Mom...I'm Home

 Mom...I'm home




     My late teen years were tumultuous and there was lots of head-butting between myself and my hard drinking father. Mostly, I feared the man with good reason since he dominated everything and everybody around him in the adult world. This was a scene I wanted nothing to do with for the most part and responsibility was the farthest thing from my mind. When I graduated from High School I planned on just hanging out with my buddies, drinking some alcohol (hated beer then) and smoking packs of cigarettes. Luckily, the influence of my brother turned me into a reader and I started thinking outside of South Gate and Tweedy boulevard. My first year out of Pius  I "attended" Cerritos College just to stay out of the draft. By the next year, fired by a dozen good books over the Summer I started to really be interested in getting educated and avoiding the draft. My father was more focused on earning money and constantly made decisions for me to "make a man out of me." On one Winter night, while dressed in only boxer shorts and a t-shirt I had it out with the inebriated BC who was forcing a decision on me I refused to accept. I looked him in the eye, cursed him and took off running. I just barely beat him out the patio but this began a series of games where he held all the cards and I was merely bluffing. The one thing I had going for me was the Sheehy household where John and Grace knew about my father's alcoholism and sympathized with my struggles. My much loved brother had joined the Navy and escaped so I was the only boy to made a man of and sometimes I could not abide by a man I now thought was not fit to guide. I later realized he was way smarter than I dreamed but I was a teenager. A couple of times we came to impasses that could not be solved and I retreated to the Sheehy's who allowed me to stay in Maureen's old room and have dinner with them in their refreshingly normal household. It was  great relief to just sit with them having a meal with absolutely no drama or recrimination. I stayed for a few days until things cooled on Annetta and my Mom interceded on my behalf so I could return home. During one week of exile I returned from school, opened the front door on McNerney and said "Mom...I'm home!" just the way Beaver said it on the television favorite. Grace was never a sentimentalist or an earth mother type but she got a laugh as did John. The line was repeated and used as a reminder of how I was truly a part of the Sheehy family. God bless them all.





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