I’ve been needing to write this blog for a long time. It was balling up and balling up inside of me for almost a year and then about a month or two ago, it became a humongous boulder now weighing on my heart and mind.
My father and I never had the greatest of relationships. We had our good days, we had our terrible ones, and then all those days in between were the ones that I never saw him because he was working all the time. He was the biggest verbal abuser I had ever know because his “father was strict and it really helped” and apparently was also a physical abuser as my mother recently told me of how he punched me in the stomach when I was only two.
The verbal abuse kept throughout my years outside of his home and when I found out I was pregnant, I knew I couldn’t handle feeling the way he made me feel and that I would never want him to make my child feel that way. When I was eight weeks pregnant, right after a fist fight in New York the day before my grandmother’s funeral, my sister called my father screaming about me being pregnant. He had only left me an “I’m sorry your grandmother passed away” message on my phone once in the three weeks that I had known I was pregnant, and I never bothered to call him back and he didn’t know why. The phone call my sister made was in May. Knowing that she likes to repeat things, I told her that I didn’t know who the father of my baby was and at one point that he was Asian. Things got back to me that my father was going around telling people that so when I tried to explain to a paternal aunt that it wasn’t true, she didn’t believe me at all and said things like “Well, you don’t want to live on Welfare your whole life. Your dad thinks you should put it up for adoption.” I sent him a nasty e-mail and then sent a bulk message to many of his family members to say what the gender of my baby was. The only response I got was from a distant uncle who doesn’t associate with the family’s bullshit talking. Summer zipped on by, no phone calls. My twentieth birthday rolled around, nothing. The birth of my first child, his first granddaughter came…he never called, showed, not a damn thing. Finally, recently I decided to tell my sister to tell him that we should do lunch. He insisted that I call him first because there were things we needed to talk about first. I was annoyed that he couldn’t at least make that move but I did it. I still haven’t decided if that was the biggest mistake ever or the best thing I could have done for myself regarding my mental health…
The conversation began with “I didn’t think you would really call. Well FIRST OF ALL, it got ‘back to us’ [from my sister, of course] that you called my wife a bad mom.” I told him that I didn’t. I said that I may have called her a bad person and definitely a SUCCUBUS but I never called her a bad mom. It was obvious that he didn’t believe me. Then he moved on, “SECOND, I can’t believe how many of my CDs you took!” “I only have like three.” “You have twelve of my CDs!” “I have three.” “Tiffany, I counted, you have twelve of my CDs. I don’t know if you left them at a friend’s or something but you have them. My wife doesn’t listen to that music, no one else could have taken them.” Okay, I gave up. I didn’t have them, but whatever. And more things, of course, “And I can’t believe you didn’t tell us you were pregnant.” Then he went on and on about how Hayley’s going to have a bad life because I live with my mom and her father is a loser and I have no job, etc. I told him that I was waiting to tell him until I was three months along in case of a miscarriage (which is completely normal considering that’s what he and his wife have done twice now) but that’s not acceptable for me. I notice with both of my parents it’s “I can do it, you can’t”. Someone in all his rambling he asked “How is she?” and I said, “She’s fine. You’re going to think I’m crazy but it’s not that hard yet.” and he changed the subject back to more complaining. I switched over for a second, trying to tell him but he was still ranting(!), and when I came back he was bitching something about how my sister and I broke his old computer. They keep claiming that MySpace ruins your computer but that’s hilarious to me since I have this laptop for two years now and I pretty much only use it for MySpace and it’s doing just fine!! Then I said, “Oh sorry I didn’t hear you because my boyfriend was calling. I tried to tell you but I guess you didn’t hear me…” He said, “Okay well I have to go because my daughter wants lunch.” It was the worst, most distancing conversation that I have ever had and the funny part is that he knew exactly what an asshole he was because he told my sister about the conversation. My sister was even mad, saying “She called you to get together with you!” It’s true. If anything proves that my father is an undeadbeat dad, that conversation was it. I stopped loving my father when I was in the third grade. I told my mother that I knew I was adopted and demanded to see a birth certificate. I’ve hated my father for since I was sixteen years old and after yelling at me about how lazy and stupid I was, when I covered my ears so as not to hear it, he kicked me with all his might leaving a huge bruise on my leg…I moved in with my mother as angry as I was with her at that moment for leaving my father and he told everyone that I moved out because I was grounded from the computer. My mother didn’t even have a computer until her boyfriend (now husband) semi-moved in. That conversation though, the first conversation with him after the most difficult and one of the most important years of my life, was the conversation where I decided that I despise my father.
Some days I cry and I really can’t decide why. I don’t know if it’s because I wish he was a better person, I miss the few happy times we had, or that I just wish I had a different father altogether. All I know is that there is a space in my heart that is missing, one that used to have that four-person family in it. Now though, that space is wanting to fill up with the drive to seek someone to fill it alongside my daughter. I will strive to someday have the picture-perfect family that I used to have.
