My Father

I haven't spoken to my father in over 2 months. I actually changed my phone number so that he couldn't call me anymore. I just got sick of him. He is nothing but a drunk. I don't want that in my life anymore. I don't know why I ever tried to find him in the first place. Oh yeah! I found out that my mother made me lie to a judge when I was 10 and tell him that my father put a knife to my throat.

A quick note about my memories, I have 2 sets of memories. I have the ones that I see from a distance view, so I know they are the ones that my mother and family made up. And then I have the ones that I see from my own point of view, these are the ones that I know are real because I can tell that I really remember them. This is just my own opinion, I don't have any clinical proof that this is the case, but it's just a feeling that I have about how the brain and memory works.

It was the realization that I wouldn't put up with having a friend in my life that talked and treated me the way that he had been. Seeing as I never really had him in my life after the age of 10, he isn't really a father figure for me. And noticing that made me see that if I wouldn't choose a friend like that, why would I allow a bum like that in my life? I grew up that day I think.

This has made me a lot tougher and stronger when dealing with other people too. I am not going to take shit from people anymore. I used to let every one just walk all over me. My friends always said that my best quality was my forgiveness and sweetness. I don't want to be sweet or forgiving anymore. Does that make me a bad person? Personally I think that it makes me a better person. Now I will be more selective in my forgiveness and my caring ways.

To explain as quickly as possible about my history with my father, I was a daddy's girl when I was very young. Then my parents started fighting a lot, I remember it back as far back as when I was only 4 years old. I remember my father being drunk all of the time. I remember getting in the middle of my parents' fights and trying to make them be nice to each other. What I really remember is how loud it was in the house all of the time.

One thing that I remember specifically was a time when I was only 5 that my parents were so busy fighting and wanting to get away from each other and that the other was leaving that they both left me alone in the house. I had to make my own dinner and put myself to bed. I remember the following day that my mother still wasn't home.

To get to more recent times with my father, I got a call from him in December of 2003 and my father was in Virginia. He had walked from Eastern Shore Maryland to there in a snow storm. I felt bad for him so I called Greyhound and got him a bus ticket from where he was to Florida. I figured that it would get him into better weather (since he was going to be homeless) and it would also get him further away from me. I thought that he would be able to go down there and get a life. At 50 years old he had never owned anything, and he had never stayed out of jail for a full year since he was 15.

Amazingly it all started when he got to Florida. His first night there he had called to ask me to send him some money for a room and I could tell he was drunk so, I told him no. It would be another 6 months before I would start calling around to jails and hospitals to try and find him. I found him in prison. Apparently, he had broken into a car the first night in Florida and he was sentenced to 9 months in jail. I would send him money every other week, about $30-50 for his commissary, totaling about $600 in total.

When he was finally released from jail I sent him $300 to get on his feet but he never did. He just spent all the money on smokes and booze. After about a month on the street he was admitted into a mental hospital for 72 hours, this would happen more then 8 times in 8 months. In between his mental hospital visits he went into a regular hospital because he drank embalming fluid, they told me he was going to die and just before I bought the plane ticket to go down there he pulled through (sometimes I wonder if it had been better for both of us if he hadn't) and he would also get arrested about 4 times for trespassing and then 2 times for fleeing and eluding the police and the additional charge at one time for assault on a police officer.

He was really messing up down there, so he wanted to come back to Maryland. With me being very sick I wasn't going to let him stay here, and I knew that he would just sleep on my lawn and cause me more stress then I needed, so I wouldn't pay for him to come back. He called me one day and told me that the homeless shelter would send him back for free if I told them he could stay with me. My father swore to me that he was going to lie with his ex-girlfriend he just didn't know how to reach her by phone.

Needless to say, he got the bus back here and his ex had moved. So, he showed up at my door without notice. So the first thing I did was call my brother, who was living in Oklahoma at the time. I told my brother that I couldn't deal with my father and my brother said he would take him as long as I sent him out there. So, within 8 hours of the time my father got in from Florida I had him back on a bus to Oklahoma. I felt such relief that he was gone. I felt bad for my brother and happy that my brother was going to take this stress away from me.

Once my father got to Oklahoma, he started going to jail, saying inappropriate things about my brother's girlfriends daughter (a 7 year old girl) and he started drinking again. I forgot, supposedly (according to my father) he had quit drinking for a few months before he came back from Florida. He was drunk all of the time and he would call me in the middle of the night and early in the morning (after I told him not to many times).

When he started calling me "Stupid Bitch" because I told him that he was acting like a child and every time I would tell him that I knew he was drunk he would call me by my mother's name. Him calling me my mother's name upset me the most because he would spend every drunk second he had talking about how she is a slut, whore, bitch, and so many other things, by calling me my mother's name he was calling me all the things that he said about her all the time.

All I ever did was feel sorry for my father and tried to help him. He has never done anything for me, ever. I don't know why I put up with it for so long. I don't even know why I put so much into this relationship with him. It's not even about the money. The money I can get back, it's the time I spent trying to get to know him, it's the emotions that I felt when I had to deal with him, and all of the effort that I put in to trying to support him and tell him that he didn't need to drink. I could have done more with my family if I had never tried to get to know him.

Maybe it was to teach me something. I don't believe in God, as most people do, I believe in Karma. I know that eventually I will be rewarded for trying to help him and he will suffer for what he has done to me.