Dalton Sings

Dalton Sings

I was listening to Lacy J Dalton sing “16th Avenue,” and I had an ache inside like I always do when I hear a song that makes me think of my mother.

I was standing in an old café, in the middle of a small town that was not my own, listening to Dalton sing, and I promptly went out and bought the CD to add to my collection of things, of songs, that make me think of the woman who raised me.  A woman that I can’t forget, and learned to forgive, and after all of these struggling years, I think I’ve finally learned how to love her without always thinking about the pain she brought to my life.

You have to understand a Southern upbringing to understand why the Dalton song moved me so standing in that lonely café, but then again, maybe we all have those things happen to us, where a song simply takes us back in time, makes us take a deep breath, or makes us want to cling to a neighboring wall to keep ourselves grounded in the current reality.

I was traveling at the time, and I’m always traveling.  I’m always under some contemplative spell.  I’m in love with the sound of voices in far off places that will never call out my name.  Voices from people who will never step into my energy field.  There’s been a safety in that for me.

My mother taught me this way of living, that’s what I tell myself, that it’s her fault.  She taught me to drift and be unsettled.  She’s the reason that I’m more comfortable with a bag over my shoulder than a 401k waiting for me in some imaginary and unknowable, abstract distance.

My mother sat at the local coffee shops in my home town, smoking, talking to friends, and acting normal before going home to what her soul was most prone to be.  In her ugliness at home I’m afraid that she couldn’t have ever said that she was mentally unstable.  The things she did in life were deliberate.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her in later years when she had to go to sleep alone, not being able to escape what she really was.

Dalton’s voice crept into the dusty old room where I was about to grab my bag and go.  I was pushing in an old rickety chair as it made sliding sounds on an old hard wood floor in the middle of no where.  The windows were high, open and bright before me, with the specials of the day painted half way up the window.   “Eggs and Bacon, only 3.99.”  The place only had seven small tables. I was on my third cup of coffee, and the only guest at this mid part of the day.  The paper cup was hot in my hands.  I stood stock still as the years of my life washed away.  I was away from the hard wood floors in present day reality.  My mind had me riding in the back seat of my mother’s burgundy Oldsmobile.

It was one of those times with my DID that I literally had to remind myself that I was all grown up, and some twenty years away from my mother, but I hurt for the loss of her like I’d lost her just that day, and it’s like that for me and my different selves.  On some days we lose her again, whereas our central self has understood that she is gone, and long gone, and gone for good.  Some of my younger parts of self still ache so for her love, even if she refused to give it.

Dalton was one of my mother’s favorite singers, and she played her music over and over again when I was small.  I miss my mother, and I miss the way I wanted her to love me.  Sometimes I feel time betrays me, being twenty years away from my old life.  I’m healing, but a little lost, and man, the clock ticks so that I think I’m going out of my mind for fear of the years passing me.

I don’t think anyone would ever ask me, “Hey, what’s it like for you, you know, that it’s actually been so many years, away from your mother?” but sometimes I wish that they would.

I don’t think people without DID would understand the meaning for me emotionally, behind the lost time, the lost years, the loss of the reality of my mother, because I toyed with the existence of her in the first place.

With divided selves, part of me is a child who wonders where the time has gone.  In my life there’s been nothing more frightening than fearing I’ve missed life, and what a relief to have a part of self integrate and see that all of time is accounted for.

So, Dalton has 16th avenue and I wonder, what’s my 16th avenue?  In the song it’s a place where people dream of a different life, a fabulous life, and sometimes they get that different and fabulous life; at least this is my perception.

I think my 16th Avenue would have nothing to do with any of this, but the sound of Dalton’s voice lulls me into peace the same way I’d wished my mother’s voice had.  I think my 16th Avenue is a street in my dreams, or some place in between this world and that.  It’s a street where I tell my mother that I love her and that I understand her now, and my mother, no matter her monstrous things, would hold me close, and be sorry for not loving me in this life.