after a couple of weeks
my dad's in the hospital in intensive care, has been for about a week. for awhile i was spending 12 hours a day with him, now i'm down to 4--we've decided we can leave him alone at night, though i hate too. (i admit it once again, i am not at all butch. i was the one who convinced my sister and my mother that if we stay with him 24-7 we will wind up hospitalized as well.) he has an infection that could well kill him, although his chances have improved since friday when they said he was probably going to die. the diff is his white blood cells have improved. as in, when he entered the hospital he almost didn't have any-- now he has normal levels. pretty miraculous, actually.

for the moment i am about cried out. though i know he has improved, it is still really hard to sit there and watch the ventilator help his breathe. specially hard to try to keep myself positive in what i say to him.

towards the end
i have no idea what's going on with my dad. last night he started bleeding internally, then stopped. i went and sat with him for a couple hours (i keep wanting to write years) last night and he was more alert than he has been in awhile. i was struck shy and dumb, couldn't think of a damn thing to say now that he might actually hear me. he might well die.

i've been having a strangely abstract identity crisis, thinking obsessively about whether i'm a "woman of color." the "woman" part is tricky enough, but i am that, i think. (whatever else i might be as well.) the "of color" part has been tripping me out. sitting holding my dad's hand, listening to the ventilator and the machines, i noted that his hand is brown and mine is yellow, although i think of us both as white. parts of his body are yellow, part bruise-purple, under the thin blue hospital robe that is one step about paper. skin flakes off his face, blood trickles from his mouth. (still bad news with platelets--his blood is not clotting.) so many colors. for years i thought him, us, white, now his illness exagerates all colors. so totally fucking gothic, just when i finally was able to get past that wear-black-to-look-more-pale thing. my dad is what makes me not white, my color is in his body. if he dies do i become white? why do i think this nonsense while sitting in a hospital room for too long/never long enough?

and shy, ridiculously shy, whenever he opened his eyes i repeated the nurses words, "they'll clean you up as soon as they can, dad," striving for a steady voice, striving not to add humiliation to the physical discomfort and yes, pain. we looked at each other. i had absolutely nothing to say. that thin robe all that protected me from his body, the vulnerability of him naked under it. i don't want him so vulnerable, i am embarassed and furious at my own stupid silent qualms.

i'll go back tonight, get through this somehow. i hope he recovers. i hope it happens soon.

anyhow, dunno why, just wanted to put this out here. if anybody believes in any kind of prayer, i welcome it. my dad is the best father in the whole damn world and i want him around for years more.

the other thing is, i'm making myself some promises i'd like y'all to help me stick to. when (if) he gets better, i want to find some way to show him some of my writing. not the stuff that will most freak him out, but some of it. i want him to see the way that i honor him in my writing, expecially where i thank him for the ways that he taught me to be masculine.

the other is, however this turns out--it is time for me to acknowlege my lover to my family. he has been rescuing me at least once a day, and it is wrong for me to continue to pretend he is a friend not a lover. i'll deal with the "so when are you getting married?" stuff when it happens. i'm ashamed at how much i've minimized him, to them and to others, when he's doing so much for me.