my soledad

*Exile as Boon

If you have attempted to fit whatever mold and failed to do so, you are probably lucky. You may be an exile of some sort, but you have sheltered your soul. There is an odd phenomenon that occurs when one keeps trying to fit and fails. Even though the outcast is driven away, she is at the same time driven into the arms of her psychic and true kin, whether these be a course of study, an art form or a group of people. It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires. Never.


And so I’m off to find what I have been , for so long, searching and searching and searching for.

This is me, finally getting free.





*Excerpt fromClarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves

okay, so....

I'm on the telephone early this morning calling to see if all is clear to drive the 300 miles to see Daddy. BTW, all is really never clear until you are sitting in the visiting room and see him walk in because apparently they can lock down at any moment. AND I guess they can terminate a visit at any moment too, but I digress.

I did the call circus; call one number - incessant ringing. Call another number - voicemail. Call a third number - dropped call (on a land line, mind you). Call the visitors hotline only to get the following message:

Regular visits for Alpha and Bravo. No contact visits for Charlie. To schedule a non-contact visit please call xxx-xxxx. Regular visits for Delta and Echo. I repeat, Echo is back on regular visits (these families must be giving them hell) but Delta 1,2 and 9 are on administrative visits only. Call xxx-xxxx to make an appointment.........

What the #@!$ is all of that supposed to mean?!

Because A was a Marine, I am going to assume it's the same logic. This Alpha, Delta business is about phonetics and clarity over the phone. Daddy's in D and there is no 1,2 or 9 in that number jungle you have to remember in order to send him mail, so I'm going up. Whew!

Two things to note here: This is all just too damn much and worth every precious minute.

surfin'blogs and tappin' my fingers

I am too damn nervouse to sleep. It is 11:02 p.m., my A is not home and something in me feels like if I go to bed, the moment will be that much closer, come that much sooner.......






Rational ME: It will be as close as it is and come as soon as it's going to come even if you stay awake until Sunday, silly.

waiting for soledad

On Sunday March 19, 2006, I am going to visit my father in Salinas Valley State Prison for the first time in nearly fifteen years.

He does not know that I am coming.

I wished on a galaxy full of stars that the weekend would arrive because this week has been full of stress in the highest order; filled with thinking about seeing him. How will he react? How will I? What will the drive up be like? The drive back? Will I run into any snags? Will I run into any people I know? (this just popped up but I guess the possibility certainly exists) Will it rain? Will I be cold (I always am) and will this make me seem like I’m uncomfortable?

I have been admonished by good friends and women of reasonable sensibility, to relax, take a deep breath; they are sure it will be fine. Me too. But that doesn’t work for whatever this thing is in my belly, doing the manic jump-around all on my nerves.

I brought myself a nice black shirt because one of the wives on Prison Talk said I couldn’t go wrong with that (there are so many things related to attire that can get you eighty-sixed, that much I do remember from my childhood visits). And while I was shopping I got that queasy feeling you get when the anticipation of a thing is at levels so high, you are sure you will either faint or fly away. It’s like the day before the first day of school, or Christmas eve or that feeling you get when the report card with an "F" and three "D"’s shows up in the mail - you know that ass is in for it. Like that.

After I brought the shirt I was on my way out of the mall and I did a thing that surprised me – I thought, “I need something pretty. I want to look pretty when I see my daddy.” And so I went into Forever 21 and bought a bundle of beaded bracelets tied together with a shiny satin bow. I put it on my wrist and thought, “Now I’ll look like his little girl.” Really.

But I have discovered in these last few grueling and tiresome days, that the desire to be that little girl has been there all along; itching in her red tights, hopping from foot to foot, waiting -rather impatiently - to be seen.

what i meant to say when i was silent

I can see why prisoners use love song lyrics in letters, they’re better.

Dear daddy,

Maybe I didn’t love you, quite as often as I could have.
Maybe I didn’t treat you, quite as good as I should have.
If I made you feel second best, I’m so sorry I was blind.
You were always on my mind. You were always son my mind.


-Fantasia, You were always on my mind

to sleep is to dream

3/16/16
8:30 p.m. [in bed]

There is no one to call. No one to call and tell that I am so tired. That I am running so fast in my head that my actual body is exhausted. I have imagined the scene from so many angles. In one, I faint. But I’m panicked because if I faint, will they rush him away? Will the make me go home when I wake? In another, I climb in his lap, lay my head on his chest like I can never really recall doing. But it’s a prison and they will never allow that and I am thirty and decorum will never allow that. The little daughters are so lucky. Then I see me driving so many miles just to be turned away again. This makes me want to sleep, forever.

remembering a soledad song

Just now, I’m driving home from Dominos, getting pizza for dinner because my nerves are too bad to cook, and I hear it. That smoky tone; a strange mix of playful and dead serious, and I am overwhelmed. I am thrown back to that visiting room so many years ago, (too much time having passed yet again) watching him walk towards me, tall and beautiful brown. Although I am thrown off briefly by how much he has aged, I am stung with a child’s disbelief which is surely plastered all over my face. A great big smile is on his. He approaches me slowly. Pauses. And says it. “Hey baby girl, how you doin’?”

If I wasn’t in my car, my daughter strapped in the rear in a car seat, I would have allowed myself to black-out on the Avenue from the sheer bliss of remembering the sound.

greetings from soledad

"Did your father send you a birthday card?"

I can hear her now although I haven't heard it in years. My mother would ask me this every summer since the summer after he went away.

At first I was delighted that he hadn't forgotten and then I was ambivilent and around thirteen or fourteen I can recall thinking, "Yeah, so, why?"

I am sure now, that it was all my father could do to get that card made and sent so that it was delivered to me on time. It was always very ornate and colorful. Maybe he paid someone to draw those very elaborate pictures of balloons and clowns and whatever other things appeared there in any given year. But eventually nothing in me cared. I would leave it unopened for days and she would ask me if I was going to read it. If this went on too long her tone would change and she would admonish me to read it. I would. I would think it was silly, too bright and busy and nothing a teenage girl wants from her father, no matter where he is. I did not write him back to thank him.

Then one year I didn't get a card. There are no words beyond this.

soledad math: the difference between today and yesterday

So frustrated yesterday at work when I couldn’t remember the address and all of the numbers you need to include on the letter. Who can remember all the damn numbers?! She can, but that’s because her love is there; the man she intends to spend the rest of her life with. But I am a daughter who needs her numbers remembered; her birth date, her graduation date, her wedding date. All of those numbers and dashes between numbers are too much to remember when you are trying so hard to just forget the whole thing.

I have the address today, the stamps and the nerve.

visting daddy:a retrospective

it is terrible and everything you dream of, all at the same time.

we are nowhere

we are nowhere.

yet we are everywhere.

when i was a teenager i would see us, me, them, there in the visiting room, forlorn and uncomfortable, sad and exhausted in our hearts. but when I am looking online, out into cyberspace for all of the boys and girls tunred men and women who waited for endless hours to spend 360 minutes seeing their daddies, i see no one. is no one talking? is no one telling? did no one make it out. except me?

on the verge

On the verge of tears on the way to work.

On the verge. I have been here for so long.

facing soledad

Today I missed work because I could barely move my limbs. My head felt enlarged and my eyes swollen from crying about this thing that I can only recall crying over a total of four times in my entire life; two of those times in the last 6 months. As I am thirty now, mother of two, wife twice and so many other things I wanted to be when I grew up, now it is time to be A.J.’s active, aware, present daughter. Doctor Valerie said today, not so much for him but for me. I have donned the fatherless daughter dress for so long that it has gotten to be a bit of a costume. It is time to go to my father – as an adult, without a grandmother or auntie escort – and get to know him. Leave “fatherless” to those who still need it.

I was afraid on and off all day that I couldn’t do it. And then maybe I wasn’t afraid, maybe I was just so used to feeling like afraid was enough of an excuse to not to do it, that I pulled it out like a kitchen knife - a silly, useless defense.

“I am my father’s daughter. I am not afraid of anything”

This is favorite line in my favorite movie, Elizabeth, and yet.

I called his counselor today after hours of being put through, to dead lines or incessant ringing or random voicemail systems. He was friendly enough. Enough to stretch my hope just a little bit further. Enough for me to book a room at the Soledad Best Western and find suitable sitters so that I can take a trip that is long overdue.

I can’t allow myself to think about it. I will go no matter what. I will sit there until he arrives and I will lay my eyes on my father for the first time in over 15 years; I will cry them out.

where to begin

Not doing it hurts. Running to the page is like energy. Like sunbursts. Like I’m crossing the finish line with every word and not doing it hurts. Holding off stings, cracks, bleeds, scabs over but never heals. Writing the story out heals. Keeping time and keeping up with the world in my head helps heal me. I did not know I was so hurt by his absence. So sliced open by the void. So blank where he belongs. So sad he’s gone.

My father has been gone for more than twenty years.

If I had a Pasadena Star News I would be able to say exactly how many seconds of absence I have experienced, piled one on top of the other, since he plowed his late model Lincoln or Cadillac into a couples only son, splitting him and me in half.He died. His family has had to live with that grief. And I have had to live without mine.

There is no way to carry the grief of an absent father when you are trying to fit into your cliques and bras and skin. There is no clear place to put it so you sit it down. It gets shuffled around until it’s firmly under your step-father’s suspicion. His suspicion that you have lost your mind for slipping his home number to more boys than you can see futures with. But you haven’t lost your mind. You have lost your father; your way, your safe lap. And so you search laps from Pasadena to Muskegon and like that traveling girl with the golden locks, discover that so many of them are too big or too small, too warm or too cold. They are not kind or true and so you swallow the losses; the things you have to leave as toll; currency for the exploration of nothing. Nothing just right. Never. And so “never” is your new song. Never love. Never trust. Never fall for it. Never care. Not ever. But “never” is a kind of paralysis. Never move. Never cry. Never try. Never paint. Never write. Never share. Never help. Never give in, until the absence throws you up like so much bad fruit. And so you swing to the worse; “always.” Always call. Always do. Always cry. Always give. Always believe. Always burn, seethe, peel, tear, never heal – and back again. Spend it all on love (read:sex), then clothes, then books, then therapy, then gas - $2.98 a gallon to drive to a sprawling Lancaster prison and search his face for all of the tiny pieces I need in order to put it together; to fix and fill my life.

what i will do

I will keep my mind on this.

I will not forget.

I will not shove it aside.

I will write.

I will call.

I will put money on his books.

I will get to know my father.

I will tell him I love him - to his face.

I will visit him.

I will take my children to see him.

I will tell him that I am not, and have never been angry at him.

I will find out whether the above statement is really true.

I will face him.

I will face this.

I will be okay.

I will be okay.

I will be okay.

her soledad

This is the story of her soledad.

my soledad.