You encouraged me from an early age
To learn about so many things
You read to me about the golden apples of the sun
You'll be gone twelve years at the end of this month
But even if you were still here and still you
I could never ask
Because you would only say
That you were right
And I was misguided
That's the way it always was
No sense in denying it now
Why did you teach me
All of those wonderful things
And then try to turn me away from them?
Why did you tell me
I needed to get a practical job
As a secretary or a nurse
When time and time again
I proved to have no aptitude
For such professions
I spent most of my life
Believing I was broken
When maybe I just didn't fit
Where I was told I ought to
I was misguided
But maybe so were you
At least when it comes to this
You planted the seed of the golden apples in my mind
I will cultivate this orchard of my imagination now
While there's still a little time
I wish that you could see the results
Maybe you do
Maybe now you can understand me
I wasn't like you
I couldn't be
I can only be like me
Is that really such a bad thing after all?
I will always love you, Dad
But the hurt of never knowing your approval
Never ends
Even now as I approach the twilight of my life
Your daughter,
Ornery Owl
Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay
notes and prompts used
"The golden apples of the sun" is a line from the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats.
My father was a professor of arts and humanities. I can remember him reading The Song of Wandering Aengus and The Tyger by William Blake.
I learned how to read by the time I was four years old. My father wanted me to be a prodigy. I have no idea if I have the intellectual capacity for such. After all, I was labeled borderline retarded when I was eleven years old.
I know for a fact that I don't have the patience to be a prodigy. I know now that I have ADHD, but that's a whole other story unto itself, so we'll save it for another time, possibly the same bat-channel, possibly not. It remains to be seen.
I always questioned how I could be retarded when I was reading and writing at an eighth grade level when I was in the fifth grade. However, I was terrible at anything beyond addition and subtraction, and I earned the borderline retarded label by spectacularly bombing on the Ravens IQ Assessment, which is based around pattern recognition.
I also had some physical coordination problems courtesy of frequent ear infections in early childhood, and I had to use a special trick to determine left from right. I still use this trick at nearly 58 years old. Just last year, I added the Never Eat Shredded Wheat mnemonic to my arsenal, so I finally can work out direction. This is an excellent tool as I have no internal compass whatsoever.
When I was 23 years old, I learned that I was not retarded, I was somewhat dyslexic. That explained a lot, and it also made me want to go back in time and slap the school psychologist, the gym teacher who put me in the special gym class, and also my sixth-grade teacher. Granted, I already wanted to smack my sixth-grade teacher because he was an abusive asshole, but that's another story for another time.
As I moved into my teen years, my parents tried to push me in directions I wasn't interested in. I now understand some of their concerns, but they went about things the wrong way. Folks, if you try to browbeat a teenager into doing something, they will either push back and do the opposite of what you want, or they will comply and resent you. Neither of those is something you want, so here's what you need to do instead.
Many of us cursed by a love for artistic endeavors know how hard it is to make a living at our obsession. This is why those with a love for the arts should also be encouraged to learn a trade they can tolerate. It needs to be a trade of their choosing, not of yours.
I did a Book Blogger Hop post about a book called Reconfigurement. It was written to help older adults find a new career path, but many of the exercises can also help people of any age figure out what careers they might enjoy. You can read the post at the following link
Or just head over to Amazon and check it out.
I will earn a small commission from Amazon for anything purchased through the above link.
And now, without further ado-doo, I will share the prompts that prompted me to create today's poem and post.
The weekly challenge from Earthweal asks poets to "look back at our younger selves, back to the first poems that made us notice them, and see where they have taken us." Some of my earliest memories involve my father reading to me the poems mentioned above.
Today's prompt asks poets to craft a "misguided" poem. Some readers may think this entire post is misguided. You are within your rights to think that, just as I am within mine to give no fucks what anyone else thinks.
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