Life's Upheavals

My daughter from a previous marriage is a sophomore at Wellesley. I'm her non-custodial parent. By an amazing stroke of luck my present wife, and that daughter, are well-acquainted and appreciate each other. My wife told me she'd seen my daughter play basketball and told me she shot threes over and over. I didn't get to see that, and still haven't. My wife and I were living in the Mexican State of Oaxaca at the time, and my wife flew to LA to have her baby, our son Patrick, in the good ol' US of A for obvious reasons: citizenship, and an obstetrician we had total faith in.

Recently my daughter and I communicated by email. I will write her some snail mail, thrilled to be in communication without anything in the way. My 'story' is that the previous marriage was destroyed by the 1980s Feminist movement. Maybe more accurate would be 'aggravated by,' rather than destroyed by, the hysteria of the 1980s Feminist movement.**

Forgive the cliche, but life sure makes some peculiar twists and turns. Can one's life be written about without betraying that the writer has a 'position,' a judgment, an evaluation, and an interpretation? In any and all circumstances probably not, but in this particular family soap opera (I've been an actor in three different soap operas, small speaking roles, and my first wife [of a total of three] played the lead in As The World Turns when the leading lady went to work on the stage in London (Eileen Fulton); my first wife's stage name was/is Pamela King) there's the possibility that my daughter might read this journal entry. No need to make the family soap opera any more convoluted. My favorite novelist, Charles Dickens, wrote what some people regard as soap opera. If that's true, then soap opera as an art form is underrated. 

**Author Susan Faludi's "Pulitzer Prize Winning" non-fiction book BACKLASH, 1991, which I bought new (pristine, hardcover) at Goodwill recently for 50 cents, and still haven't read, is actually about the 'backlash' against women, when I thought it was going to be about women striking back at men! Here it is fourteen years later and the "Backlash" is in full fury as demonstrated every weekday on the Tom Leykis radio talk show, a program which receives as many calls from women as it does from men! women just gurgling with appreciation for Tom's sexism.

Somehow, someway, I must, I absolutely must create a relationship with my daughter. The really bright spot in this mess is that she really likes my present wife, a fact that gives me courage and hope. It also fills me with admiration for my wife, Elsa, who created the friendhip all on her own. I was thousands of miles away holding the fort.

Barry