15. Scary encounter with the ex

Christmas  1990 Victor Harbor , South Australia  with Lesia , Sacha , Leigh  and Puppy 

Lesia came out to visit on Christmas Day. It was the first Christmas the four of us had been together since Christmas 1983 when Leigh was six months old and Sacha was not quite three. Lesia and I acted as civil as we could. The children and I had spent days decorating the living room. We had a very large tree with a mixed bag of holiday type of items hanging and draping. Because Australia is during summer come December there is quite a different protocol than what I grew up knowing Christmas as when I was a child. Instead of cold and snow, it is hot and most folks go to the beach or have a barbeque outside. Being the Yank that I was I enjoyed doing Christmas. We would get a tree as large as the room could cope with and put everything from lights to popcorn strings to cut outs, tinsel, and balls on every space. We also had streamers all over the house and just generally decorated the house in Christmas drag. Being the materialistic person that I was I had way too much for the children I would start buying presents about six-months earlier and because we always had a money issue I would get something whenever I saw it on sale and we had a few extra dollars.

The only things I remember, aside from lots of plastic toys for both children from that Christmas was a new baseball bat for Leigh and small trains for Sacha. At the time, they were into toys called Transformers that would turn into other toys. For example, an airplane would become a robot or a tank would become a boat. We still had our boxes of train tracks and electric carriages, but they were in the shed in boxes already beginning to gather rust. Sacha liked miniature trains, and he had been gradually building up a collection of them. Over the years and with all our moves we would just fill boxes with toys and get more and drag the boxes to the next place. When I finally got rid of almost everything in February 2002 the sidewalk in front of our house in Christies Beach was covered with box after box of toys and furniture with a sign saying free. I like to think that some child is still playing with some of these toys that my children were so excited about unwrapping fifteen or more years earlier. I kept the baseball bat and it is sitting in a shed with two or three boxes of souvenirs of a past that can only be relived in my mind, my stories and in this writing because not all of the actors from that one Christmas in 1990, the second Christmas that the whole Neuage family would ever be together are no longer on this planet.
We celebrate moments together never knowing whether we will be celebrating that moment in the future only in our mind or once again with the same people we laughed and joked with before.

Lesia brought the boys a television and I remember some computer games but little else from that day. Oh yes, we all went for a short drive together into Victor. Nothing was open because it was Christmas morning. It was a bit eerie like being in a ghost town and the four Neuages walked up and down the streets looking in the closed shops and the closed restaurants and pubs.

We were strolling metaphorically through our closed lives; lots of shops all closed off to one another.

Granite Island Victor Harbor
We walked through the little park and to the jetty that goes to Granite Island. The children and I had walked across the causeway many times and looked at the Fairy Penguins that lived amongst the rocks and walked around the island looking back at the beauty of Victor Harbor and the hills that surrounded it. But we had never done this walk with Lesia. There would be only one other time the four of us were together in Victor and that was at a piano recital that both boys played a piece in and Lesia and I sat together.

We walked through the little park and to the jetty that goes to Granite Island. The children and I had walked across the causeway many times and looked at the Fairy Penguins that lived amongst the rocks and walked around the island looking back at the beauty of Victor Harbor and the hills that surrounded it. But we had never done this walk with Lesia. There would be only one other time the four of us were together in Victor and that was at a piano recital that both boys played a piece in and Lesia and I sat together.

I know it was hard on the children to have parents dislike each other so much. Every weekend they would go to Adelaide they would leave Victor so excited and come back angry or sad. Lesia and I had promised that we would not put each other down in front of the children but they would come back telling me nasty things she had said about me so I would say nasty things about her. For Leigh who had begun living with me at the age of one and half years old there were no memories of Lesia and I being at all civil toward each other except for two times in Victor: Christmas of 1990 and a piano recital a couple of years later. Sacha at least was almost four years old when we separated and he has memories of us living together.
Some people just should not have children together and we were such a couple. The children get set up to get even with the other person and it is almost as if they only existed to be used as weapons. I always wanted to be a single parent and now I was but I wasn’t really a single parent because I was constantly at war with Lesia and the battles continued until their tragic end.

I look at life and I have no idea what the hell is going on. No one really does. We have religion and philosophy and all these different stories of the way it is but really it is all such bullshit. Whenever humans began to communicate, whether it was a million years ago or one hundred thousand years ago or just a few thousand years ago there has been a desire to formulate a reason for our being here. I explore some of these early attempts at communication in my PhD thesis, “Conversational analysis of ‘chatroom talk’”. But at the end of the day, the bottom line is that no matter how much two humans know;  how educated they are;  how spiritual they are;  how caring, loving, giving they are: if they are incompatible, especially in communication, they will never be able to have children and raise them as a healthy human being. 

I know that if I had raised my two children alone, if I had been able to return to the States with them, they would have been fine. But wait & why is anything the way it is? Why were Leigh and Sacha born? Surely, they did not come into being just to be weapons for Lesia and I to destroy one another with or did they? Can humans really destroy one another through thoughts and words?

Perhaps in the future with ‘thought police control’ we will be able to send those who are negative to one another to ‘thought prison’ where their bad thoughts will be erased and a new computer chip will be inserted.

I do not believe we are destructible because matter only changes form it cannot really be destroyed. Maybe looking at the cosmos helps here, and I am not an astrophysicist type of dude, but those kinds of people claim that we are made up of the same material as the stars. So, if stars change form and eventually become stellar dust which is part of our construct then surely when we lose our current form we still exist. So then it is incredibly egotistical and just downright stupid to believe our children have anything more to do with us than to gather enough material from our genetic stuff to form their body in order to have their experiences. Why would Sacha and Leigh want to have any part of Lesia and me? Were they conscious creators who needed to experience life based on how badly we could parent in order to progress as souls?

Lesia stayed until early afternoon and went back to Adelaide and we agreed that we should put our differences aside and have each Christmas together. Of course, we never did that again and it is not good to regret anything that we have done because it is already done but if I regretted something from the past it is that Lesia and I could never get ourselves into a position where we could have another Christmas together and now it is all too late. We were never going to be a dynasty but there was once a chance that the Neuage family would become more than four and those chances are rapidly slipping away and I think perhaps it was the nature of things that there would never be more than four Neuages. Now there are three of us and someday there will be two and then one and then none and eventually Neuage will not even be a genealogical footnote to anyone’s genealogical footnote.

16. 10th grade > PhD

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.