I’m not going to pretend I had a bad childhood because I know others have it worse than myself. I just had a shitty period of my life that left a wound.

-Catalyst-

My biological Father was an alcoholic and near the end of my parents relationship he started getting physically abusive. My mother’s life was my brother and myself, she was willing to take that abuse because she thought that we would be better off with him in our life.

There are parts of my childhood I’ve blocked out subconsciously and can’t remember. One such memory was the catalyst that started the divorce that I found out as an adult.

One day my mother was in the kitchen where I brought her a Sears catalogue (Big department stores use to mail these out to advertise featured items to buy) I asked her in years “Can we buy another Dad?”. My Mother’s heart broke because she realized she wasn’t protecting us and the bad marriage was affecting us also.

-Choices-

The last visitation my brother and I had with my Father was when he brought us over to one of his friends. She had kids that were our age and in our school, so we played. He was sitting in the backyard talking and drinking with the group until it was time to go home.

He drove home with us despite being very drunk and not fit to drive. At one point he attempted to make us laugh by driving faster going down a hill to make it feel like a roller coaster. Instead he lost control of the vehicle, fish tailing into oncoming traffic and almost got T-boned by another car. He miraculously didn’t hit anything, and the other person asked if he was OK. He knew my father was drunk when my father relied that we were. He then noticed that we were in the back seat, and told him “Your kids are in the back, I should call the fucking cops.” to which my father responded “Go ahead, they’ll be in the police station the entire night.”. The other driver was completely shocked and said “You’re a fucking loser” and drove off.

He called my mother after dropping us off the next day and said that he didn’t want to see us anymore. She sat my brother and I down, telling us that he didn’t want to do visitations anymore. We of course cried and we went out to a restaurant later to try and cheer us up.

As a kid I remembered thinking “Why doesn’t our dad not want to see us? Does he love us?”. As an adult I know it wasn’t that, he was an alcoholic that chose alcohol over family because having your kids on the weekends takes away the time to drink.

Addiction can be a powerful thing, but I’ve forgiven the man he was, however he still lost the option to be a part of my life.