Today is father’s day. It’s a day that many people spend
with the man that showed them how to be a man. I don’t have that luxury. I’ve
lost count but it’s been over a decade since I’ve spoken to my father. The
reasons are complicated but to make a long sad story short, the man is
incapable seeing other people’s point of view and he also doesn’t agree with my
lifestyle. My lifestyle is simply defined as I make my own adult decisions
about my life and I live with the consequences of those decisions instead of
just doing exactly what he wants when he wants it. I had to audacity as a young
adult to get married to a girl he didn’t approve of, move away from my
hometown, and start a career he didn’t have the stomach for himself. In other
words, I had the courage to live my life when he didn’t when he was in my
shoes. He wanted me to stay home in fear of the world and live my life in
service to my family. I chose myself. It sounds selfish but my family didn’t
need me to stay around. There weren’t sick or immobile. They are more collectivists,
whereas I am more individualistic. Our worldviews are incompatible. The straw
that broke the camel’s back was when my daughter was born. He couldn’t be
bothered to sober up for a few hours to see his first granddaughter or as I
thought at the time, his only granddaughter. (side note, I found out a few
years ago that I have some half siblings that he kept from family.) The first
time her saw her was when she was six months old. He didn’t want anything to do
with her. Despite all of this mess and the parts I’m not talking about, I
learned how to be a father by not following his very poor example.
For a large part of the time that I didn’t have my father
after we stopped speaking to one another, I had my father in law. He was as
close to a real father as I had ever had. We spent time together, when fishing,
and generally did adult relationship father-son stuff. Well, come to find out
this man was as evil and despicable as my real father but in completely
different ways. His betrayal was more hurtful than my blood father. The lies
that he told and allowed to be told about my family were the worst kind of
things you could say about another human being. He took actions to undermine my
wife’s relationship with her siblings. He and his evil wife also tried to destroy
my relationship with my wife, his daughter. He was the “perfect” dad to my face
and the most evil human being behind my back. The only way we found out was because
we reached out to my wife’s siblings to try and rebuild the lost relationship.
When we began to compare notes, the truth shined through. During one of the
confrontations, he called the cops on me. Luckily, nothing happened.
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