On Father’s day, I drove my best friend Gaylee and myself to my daddy’s grave, where we shared tears of love mixed with my words: “I miss you, I love you incredibly, I hope you hear me – I know you are in my heart always.” (He died in 1977)

I brought a bright brown pottery pot holding three Dianthus (sweet william) flowers splashing pink and purple. I’d planted them several days before; one day I noticed while watering that a bump, the size of a golf ball, had appeared in the soil. I pushed the potting soil down, thinking that a vole or mole or squirrel had dug there searching for a nut or two? The following day the bump appeared again like a flower bulb had erupted, and once again, I packed it downward.

When I set the pot on the side pf daddy’s grave marker, reading, “BEST DAD EVER, LOVE YOU FOREVER,” that same soil lump appeared in the same spot it had before, but this time when I pushed down with my finger, a brown-spotted head appeared to our surprise! Gaylee explodes, “It’s a frog!” Then, it jumped onto the edge of the pot, and I dashed to my car to grab my camera.

Luckily, toad waited the seconds needed for me to snap, snap, snap.

More importantly, we couldn’t leave TOAD at the cemetery when rain was not in the forecast for a week; how would he/she survive? No one to water its home.

Right away, my thoughts went to remembering daddy stopping our car (when I was 10) along side Judd Falls Road to pick up and assist a turtle crossing this busy road.

Gaylee goes to her car to fetch a plastic cup and bag in which she poked some holes for air – in which to carry toad to a wetter-better environment. It just so happened that we were fairly close by a gorge with a waterfall, barely trickling.

(I was surprised how vigorously TOAD jumped to the top of the cup over and over again. Maybe the flowerpot soil was very nutritious as well as cool:)

Since Gaylee is not so steady on her feet – I walked down the hill to the creek, until stopped by a wall, 5-6 feet above a small pool of water maybe 3-4 inches deep. I knew in my heart that that it would be a safe and happy home for our friend as I flung TOAD from the cup, splashing into the shallow water; swimming away.

Life is a list of perseverances in order to liberate my true being.

So is that why I regularly think: I need to climb the Statue of Liberty? Also, I drive a 2006 Jeep Liberty – claimed by its marketing name: Liberty.

Presently, my twists and turns result in being tired of writing about how I came into this lifetime as a child of rape, conceived in Bremmerhofen, Germany. Yet, I’m fully inspired to write about my seventeen year old dad, unable to speak English, when arriving in the USA from Germany.

Dad, being a youth resister to the rise of Hitler, dreamed of attending medical school in America, as he sailed past the Lady holding high the Liberty Torch into New York City’s harbor. He only knew an aunt and uncle with whom he did not get along; eventually venturing out on his own, finding menial jobs like: “Going up, going down, watch your step please.” He became a US citizen, and joined the US Army, fighting against his homeland: his Catholic family, his three brothers who died in WWII.

He fell in love with my mother, the nurse taking care of him on the ship Huddleston as it returned from WWII; once again sailing past Lady Liberty.

He saved me from being aborted, liberating me by signing my birth certificate as my father, giving up his individualistic dreams especially for me, and then his two children born after me. He loved me as his own, unlike my mother whose shame could not.

My spirit drove me to be liberated from my family’s (mostly my mother’s) addiction to the one-way-to-god religion – finally not just hearing my ten-year-old-inside-voice saying that it is not the truth – and then listening, despite the fear of being rejected by my ‘church’ community.

I would not listen to the baptist church admonishment to keep my two daughters away from their coming-out gay father!

I would run 36 marathons in 36 months, garnering a national women’s record, literally running away from my feelings of not being truly recognized for who I am; finally recognizing (dark painful) Feelings as being the best “F” word going:)

I would marry four times and give up my shame of others judgmentalness.

I would stomp and cry when my fourth husband would not trust that I was telling the truth: I was not having affairs.

I would advocate to provide a HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP SKILLS COURSE at my local high school for 25 years and counting after becoming a Marriage and Family Therapist.

I would write a trilogy of books although I received a 65 in English at Cornell University. All three titles came to me while running (one day in 1995): TEARS ARE TRUTH…waiting to be spoken (published 1999), TEARS ARE TRUST…waiting to be felt (2007), TEARS ARE TRUE LOVE…waiting to be known (2013).

I would hear, “I choose not to forgive you” at my eldest daughter’s 2016 birthday dinner; sliding off her tongue like melting ice cream. A month later I wrote a loving email-letter to her about how resentment hurts her most of all. She knows this already. (all- ready to forgive someday?)  I so desire her true love.

At Mother’s Day brunch (2016) I ask her if she’d like to see the ballroom I’m helping to renovate – to be able to see the before and after. I hear her say: “Not really; but if you would like me to go, I will,” in an innocent girl-like tone.

It’s still May, my most favorite month of the year. My daddy’s 99th birthday is the 4th (if he were alive); my second daughter’s birthday is the 6th; my third granddaughter’s birthday is the 14th. The trees dress up in various shades of greens; tulips speak  their

many colors, and I dig up wild Forget-Me-Nots from a stranger’s yard to transplant to my and other’s gardens. (They say, “Take all you want!”)

I would plead guilty to rolling through a stop sign at 1am, where no head-lights could be seen from the intersection. There is a space under Plea of Guilty to give an “explanation” which I write to the judge as I saw clients at the time of the court appearance.

I would be shocked to read the judge’s letter saying I’m fined $193 for using my own good judgment.

I would appeal the ticket and speak on the phone with Judge Norman; who asks me, “Why did you plead guilty?” I reply with sincerity:  “Because I’m an honest person.” Later, he asks the same question again; I reply, “Because I have integrity. There’s a space for an explanation which you say you read.” I feel liberated.

The judge says, “Why didn’t you come to court so I could see your face?”

     Is this the face of Lady Liberty?

Addendum: The hurt I felt – the betrayal of trust – of not knowing the truth that my dad was not my bio-father until it was angrily yelled at me by my mother when I was sixteen  has propelled my spirit to tell the truth and to expect to be trusted. I feel in my heart of hearts (as the cliché goes), passionately, that I am truly the reflection of my dad’s heart-face.

I recently returned from my yearly visit to Florida to have a break from the winter’s cold in NY; more so to become closer to my sister, Constance, whom I love, despite our  differences.

She’s religious; I’m spiritual.

I’m attracted to men; she avoids dating.

She has 5 children; I have two.

She’s been divorced once after a 30 year marriage; I’ve been divorced four times, my longest-together-marriage being 6 years. Our overwhelming commonality is sharing a bedroom until I was 16, she was a year younger.

Constance tells me how I hurt her by chasing her around her twin bed, acting like a scary vulture, my hands curled grotesquely in the air. I own it and say ‘I’m sorry’ more than once….now aware that I was acting out my own hurt, with angry helplessness over being constantly criticized by my mother who did not want me. (I’m a child of an acquaintance rape.) Yet, I was saved by my daddy’s love; who chose to keep me, and adopt me, as I am not his biologically.

My parents met on the ship Huddleston, on their return home to America when WWII ended. My mother was the nurse who took care of her patient, my soon-to-be-dad. They had fallen in love.

They married after I was born. When I became an adult, my mother told me that she had fallen out of love, saying, “I shouldn’t have married him.” (Thank goodness she did! I say to myself.) Still, they co-created two more children, my younger sister and brother.

Although I have gathered several photos of my mother and father’s early days together, even their wedding portrait, none carry the feeling of love I can see and feel when I discovered a photo I’d never seen before. It was my last day while visiting my sister (April 2016); found amidst some photos on the table next to the bed I slept in. It’s small 2″ by 2″ size portrays a much larger love: their arms holding each other, while smiling; he in his army uniform, and she dressed in the rosy-cheeked ‘falling in love’  feeling…sadly, her first impression was short-lived but my impression of my daddy continues to enlarge my love for him.

My office is two blocks from Pizza Aroma, owned by Mauricio, who left his home country, El Salvador, to find freedom from war and poverty. I haven’t experienced poverty really, although I was on Medicaid and food stamps for a year when my two daughters were very young and my husband a graduate student.

Until eight years ago, I wouldn’t go out for lunch in order to save money; better spent on traveling or my family. When my psychotherapy business grew despite the 2008 recession, so did my friendship with Mauricio, occasionally enjoying a slice of one of his gourmet pizzas. Imagine a salad pizza: spinach, artichokes, black olives, onions, red peppers, adorned with sprinkled parmesan cheese in balsamic dressing.

I’ve lost count as to how many years I have lunched 3-4 times a week at Pizza Aroma, smiling in return to Mauricio’s black-mustached smile; his delight in slicing fresh cut garlic on my requested Sicilian, or avocados on my black-bean slice.

I like the feeling of giving back to an immigrant who not only creates great pizza slices but also gives America a slice of delicious diversity.

     My mother took good physical care of her three children, myself being the oldest. Yet,

why was I the one she dealt out steaming criticism. I thought maybe it was because I had

a mind of my own; by defending my father, or questioning her one way to god.

One day after school when I was 16, the reason became clear as crystal.  My mother

stands near the window of my sister-shared bedroom; I stand over the vacuum cleaner

near the doorway once again defending my father. “He’s not your father!” she yells.

Shock quaked my world into a spiral of deadly confusion. For many years I had no

memory of what I did next.

After becoming a mother of 2 daughters, I asked my mother how I came to be. She

had met an attractive soldier at a Red Cross dance. Sometime later he invited her to his

place and mickeyed her drink, only realizing this a couple months later when she felt theshock of being pregnant. Apparently, while unconscious, he “had had his way with her” -been raped, although she couldn’t use that word while telling me.

When mom told William Hairston that she was carrying his child, he rejected any

involvement. Luckily, WWII had recently ended; but certainly not the war inside her.

While sailing home from Germany to America, she cared for patients on the ship

Huddleston, and fell in love with Michel S. Colbert. She wrote on a card, now in my

possession, “Forever Yours, Ellen.”

Back then, shame was poured onto women pregnant out of wedlock. Being five

months along, mom asked a doctor to abort me. He refused. (thank god)  Soon after, she and her new love drove 3 hours to Tarrytown, NY where an adoption agency might give me away. (thank goodness that didn’t happen)

At the last minute, my ‘adoptive’ dad signed my birth certificate as my father.

PS. Luckily, my dad saved me by showering me with love equal to that given to his 2

biological children born after me.  I am forever grateful!

I lived in the same house from age 3 until I was 16; across the road from tall pine trees buffeting Ithaca’s reservoir, where my dad and I and my two sibs hiked frequently. We also played in the fields behind our house. I easily fall into the scene where dad built a small waterwheel, spinning in the grassy stream feeding a small pond, where I collected black caps big as my thumb, with which my mom would bake blackberry pie. Yum!

Moving from that ‘home’ is one of the rare moments I remember crying. At my house. I cried on several occasions however when in the ‘house of the lord’, especially when the invitation to accept Jesus as your lord and savior or to dedicate your life to christ was given. The minister of the Bethel Grove Bible church would hold his bible high in the air – emphasizing to us the great sinners we were. I can hear Just as I am being played on the piano or organ – see my tears falling, as did I, into the grasp of a dogma that filled me with self-doubt and eventually led me to a deep inner knowing: this religion can’t be true.

It wasn’t until 1984, (like being an adult in Huxley’s Brave New World) that I had the courage to embrace my childhood inner knowing; to fully trust my feelings and not my parent’s religion. Many many tears escaped as I clutched onto my truer JUST AS I AM: trusting the innocent child, who is born in the spirit of LOVE, with staring wide open eyes of no fear. How hard it is as a child to embrace that divinity, when the need for parental approval is overwhelming as an ocean tide!

My mother was strict: no going to the theater, movies, dancing or swimming on Sundays. I memorized thousands of bible verses in order to attend a free week of Miracle Camp for several summers, where boys and girls were not permitted to swim together. Leaving my church community was painful because of their rejection. Yet, I was rewarded with the freedom of no longer being damned to the eternal lake of fire.

As I delved into my sorrow and sadness and soul – I soared into the dancer JUST AS I AM. Still, the guilt lingered until sobbing one day in a psychotherapy session, I connected to a past life as a professional ballerina in Paris in the 1800s. My guilt melted faster than a child’s snowman in springtime. Ever since, I’ve continued to dance 3-4 nights per week.

Presently, I am helping my friend Karen unload the 37’x 20′ ballroom in her 200 year old Federal house where 20 plus years of accumulated unused furniture, odds and ends, and clothes have resided. It’s the only room that has not been renovated. I feel excited each week to clean up and out a carload of stuff driven to the Salvation Army, Significant Elements (recycling of old things) and to Mimi’s Attic (consignment selling). It’s like returning life to someone through CPR (Clearly Property Restoration).

Karen has agreed to help actualize my dream of using this ballroom for my 2016 birthday celebration after insulating, dry walling, wallpapering and sanding has been accomplished. As of January 2016, just the two of us have emptied 3/4 of the ballroom and have until August to revitalize (with the help of two men) this beautifully high arched  room of an ancestral house –  revitalized JUST AS I AM. I’m remembering now how when I asked my mother who was gravely disappointed when I left the ‘house of the lord’, what she thought was my most positive attribute, she said: “your vitality.”

I was a wallflower in high school, because I was self-conscious of being flat-chested like a wall. Of course, a boy in junior high calling out in the hallway as students changed classes, “Hey pancake!” didn’t do me any good. I’m sure I blushed, slouched my shoulders, and wondered why kids need to be mean. So, I stuffed Kleenex into my bra, until I found padded bras.

Being skinny didn’t help either. I didn’t have dates or boyfriends like my younger sister. My crushes were kept in my heart – until I met the Beach boys (twins whose last name was Beach:) at the Bethel Grove Bible church where my family attended 2-3 times per week. My sister and I went on a double date with them once.

When we changed to the Tabernacle Baptist church, I met Chuck who would become my first real boyfriend in our senior year; then he broke up with me our freshman year at Cornell University. I can still see me walking around Beebe Lake all alone keeping my tears to myself. Later, we became engaged and welcomed two beautiful daughters.

As most high schoolers do, you dream of a long happy marriage, not four, like what my karma has displayed. Yet, I’m so ‘great-full’ for all of them! Interestingly, I chose my high school junior theme to be UTOPIA, looking for ideal love? which might be like going back to my 15th year high school reunion where MJ, one of the girls high school heart throbs said to me, “You’re so beautiful; where were you in high school? You’re the most beautiful now!” Was I beginning to reflect self-love?

WOW! I was stunned, like when my daughters were in high school, their dad now in a gay relationship, and singing “The Impossible Dream” in the Elmira High School musical where he was a music teacher. I was a Marriage and Family Therapist by this time, and began sobbing while hearing their father sing., aware enough to vow to myself that I’d never again be ashamed of crying in public. Even to sob there. As I walked into the foyer after the performance, a man-stranger walked up to me and said, “You’re stunning!” despite my reddened eyes. Maybe a truer self-love was showing through?

So opposite of my experience of holding back my tears, feeling embarrassed, as I tried to speak with my high school math teacher about an ‘unfair’ grade.

By the early nineties, I had EVOLved into dreaming of teaching a HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP SKILLS course at Ithaca High School where I and both of my daughters have graduated. I, like Martin Luther King, Jr. have a dream to bring justice and love to ALL beings without the use of violence, like the bullying that takes place in our schools and streets and in our homes that has caused many teens to commit suicide.

For over 20 years I have met with the superintendents, teachers, and students who agree it’s a good idea, students particularly wish for it, yet our high school administration is still afraid to have this course offered even though electives like oceanography are.

My heart still cries…like I did with a client this past week, when a father brings in his 6 month old son to his therapy session. At the end of the session I was saying how baby Grayson  just looks into our eyes and does not turn (shy) away…there’s no fear of looking into my soul, for there is no fear with “perfect” love…and there in the silence of Grayson and I looking into each other’s eyes without wavering I began to cry.

Seeing the image of my dad swimming the side stroke is the first thing that comes to mind and I wonder why. We are at Robert Treman State Park where a waterfall flows into a natural deep swimming pool. It is where I learned how to swim. I see myself practicing with my hands pushing the ground while saying, “Watch me!” to my parents, “See me swimming?”

During the summer, my mother prepared a picnic basket of sandwiches and fruit and cookies, my favorite being chocolate chip with walnuts, the kind I buy each day at the local Wegmans, on my way to work. I’m leaving for there now.

It’s later now as I write imagining my father driving our one car to work, while my mom chooses to shuttle her three children onto the Bethel Grove Community bus that drove us each summer Monday morning to Robert Treman’s swimming hole. It’s funny to remember how we had to wait an hour after our lunch to return to swimming for the fear of cramping, which was thought back then might cause us to drown. Actually, it’s not so funny and I think to myself how so many times we laugh at seriously sad or fearful things. I’m sure I was swimming in tears growing up but learned early on, like most everyone, not to show them. Still, seeing myself boarding the bus at the end of our day licking a Sugar Daddy makes me smile. Walking ahead of my mother, as she would say, “a mile.”

My mind floats to swimming in my mother’s amniotic fluid where I was unwanted because I am a child of rape. She was five months pregnant so the doctor would not grant her an abortion…thank god!! (the DOU, Design Of the Universe I’m wont to say) When my parents drove to Tarrytown, NY to give me up for adoption, my father asked my mother to keep me and he signed my birth certificate when I was born. I felt that he loved me just as much as my brother and sister who were born after me. (a “side stroke” of luck?)

Unlike my mother’s initial fear to keep me, she volunteered as a registered nurse during WWII in Europe and met my dad as a patient on their return to America on the ship Huddleston. When I asked her why she would risk her life to go to war, she said, “Somebody needs to take care of the soldiers,” as tears glistened in her gray-blue eyes.

When mom died in 2002, I cried like a baby as I spoke at her memorial service about the deep hurt of her not loving me for 50 years and how it had been transformed into hearing, “I love you,”  a few months before her death. I had learned to wash away my anger and was able to cry with my mother.  My memorial eulogy ended with the image of her diving off Robert Treman’s (tears now) high diving board at age 65…like a swan…so gracefully, did she leave our earth plane life together, something I still attempt each summer to get over my fear to spring dive off that board…so far I can only jump with Love.

I was lucky enough to have a daddy that built a tall metal swing set beside our house for his three children…I guess no manufactured smaller ones would do. He, being a radio astronomer at Cornell University, worked on radio telescopes delivered in huge cartons made of plywood, and I can still see one being transported onto the abandoned railroad tracks in our backyard. We called the carton our Clubhouse, where we had friends come for sleepovers, and I practiced kissing with girlfriends. Preparing for kissing boyfriends.

Behind the Clubhouse is a field where a small pond grows cattails, tadpoles, and is bordered by blackberry bushes that produced thumb-size blackcaps as we called them. I loved eating them fresh as I gathered some for my mother to bake one of her fabulous flaky pastry pies. There were wild strawberries in the fields too, sweeter than the strawberries we grew in our garden; daddy allowing a small patch for me to plant.     Daddy played badminton with me after supper too, and sometimes set up his telescope for us to look at the stars in that backyard of my youth.

We played hide and seek, tried to catch fireflies, one landing on my fourth ring finger so I could pretend I was engaged. Someday. Of course I climbed trees being the “tomboy” I was.

Today, I am still that “tomgirl” as I look out the window into my backyard as I type this essay. Remembering as clear as the blue sky, daddy carving out the blades of a small water wheel which the trickling stream out of that pond caused to circle as my sister and I looked on with wonder. And, I’m still surprised that I’m crying now, after years of his passing on, after years of crying about losing him and my childhood wonder due greatly to my mother’s religious fears of hell.

I was born and raised in Ithaca, NY. As a young adult, I left for ten years and returned in 1974, appreciating my home town at least ten times more. It’s now fall 2015 when I notice someone has painted “question everything” on a Ithaca Commons building, in the backyard of my office.

I have a backlog of tears that water my soul like the rain watering the flowering mums outside my window. Yards and yards of love to recover for my wondrous child now a parent and grandmother, who never questions that her daddy loved her as best as any man could.

When I was a girl, my mother called me bossy: “Francis the Talking Mule.”  I must have learned to be bossy from her as she was the one who “wore the pants in our house” as far as I could see and feel. Especially when I was 16 and she lost it by yelling at me, “He’s not your father!” Though this was the first time I had been told this truth she convinced my dad not to talk to me about it. She told me as an adult that she thought: “She’ll get over it!”

Well, my mother’s thought bossed my head around, making me afraid as an adult to ever talk to my dad about why he was not my biological father; I’d thought he was until that fateful day. My mother was mad that I often defended my dad whom I felt loved me! I knew loved me! He even wrote to me in nursing school asking why I had held back my affection from him (since I was sixteen)…yet he was afraid to ask me in person, as was I. Over the years, my fears have transformed  into tears of loss.

Mom was the strict one of our fundamental christian family….making even dancing not okay. In elementary school dancing the Virginia reel or the jitterbug didn’t seem to be a problem but when I entered junior high, I would dance slow with a boy and then return home feeling guilty. According to my mother, I was tempting the devil and  becoming “worldly.”  Of course sex was not really explicitly spoken about except that you do not have sex until you are married. Though I knew people make love, I had no idea there was such a thing as masturbation until I was married at 22.

Anyway, I couldn’t continue to dance with the guilty feeling bossing me around in my head until I began to loosen the grip of my mother’s religious beliefs that had impaled me. I became a hypocrite (according to my mother) in my twenties when I began to dance the hustle during the week and then participate in a more liberal Living Hope church on Sundays.

At age 38 I finally jumped out of the chains of religion, after birthing two beautiful daughters,  divorcing my coming out gay husband whom I had married as a Virgin, and becoming a Marriage and Family Therapist. With boyfriends, I began stretching my sexual wings and feeling free. Mostly.

In my fifties, I was dancing 4-5 nights a week and hearing a bossy voice saying, “You should be serving others more; not having so much fun for yourself.” After having become a primal therapist in addition to an MFT…I knew I had to have a session to rid myself of a burdensome guilt! By this time, I had healed a good deal of my childhood pain by becoming a surfboard of rage into my ocean of tears. In this particular session, I was transported into another lifetime: images of being a ballerina on stage, sensing I was in Paris, having lost my career from a broken ankle.

I cried out, “I AM A DANCER!” Since that sobbing session, my guilt is gone, and I dance with the boss of freedom, to be me!