Haylstorm

Why I was abandoned

My parents had always fought, but when I was 15 it reached a whole new level. Things were being thrown, screaming reached a new loudness, and my dad started sleeping on the couch, or completely out of the house. My parents thought they kept their fighting quiet, and that it was going unnoticed, but the truth is it was impossible to ignore.

      Because my dad was a truck driver he wasn't home very often, which meant when he was home, all of the fights would explode at once. This was difficult because my dad went from being my favorite person, to being someone I didn't want to see because I knew if he was home, there would be fighting. It started to become worse for him to be home than it was for him to be on the road.

      My parents started to see a counselor, but nothing seemed to get better. Eventually on October 6, 2013 my dad called my brother and I into the living room and announced that him and my mother were getting a divorce. He promised that he would still be around to be a father to us and that it was neither of our faults, that him and my mother simply stopped loving each other.

I probably should have been able to see through his lies- since I was such a talented liar myself- but the truth didn't come out until after he left.

    
     He left that night and only came back early the next morning to get his things from the garage, and then later that day when my brother and I were in school, he set foot in the actual house to grab his clothes. He didn't take a single picture of my brother and I, or any of the countless gifts and projects I had made specifically for him throughout the years. I don't know why I expected him to, but knowing that he didn't care enough to even take a picture felt like a punch right in the face.

     The next few months were the hardest. My mother was absolutely broken, understandably so. My brother became even more introverted than he already was and I would walk into his room to find his stuffed animals ripped to shreds, or his favorite movie posters ripped off his walls and torn apart. It was awful watching them like this and I knew that if I was to show my sadness, the whole house would be a disaster. So I assured everyone I was perfectly fine. I denied therapy when my mom suggested it, I made jokes, I said we didn't need him, and I told everyone I was happy he was gone because everything happens for a reason. None of that was wrong by any means, but since they were things that I didn't believe myself, I was unknowingly creating unhealthy coping mechanisms with my "jokes". In reality I couldn't wrap my head around why my dad didn't want to stick around, or why he thought I wasn't worthy of being a father to, or what he saw in us that made him want to run away and never look back.

He promised he would always be around, but he never answered any of our texts or calls, and suddenly his side of the family started to believe that we kicked him out. I discovered that my father had been cheating on my mother, had moved in with the woman he cheated on her with, and had been purposely skipping work so he wouldn't have money to pay child support. These, on top of many other truths came out and I began to feel nothing but anger towards him.

One day in December he called my mother asking to see my brother and I. At this point I knew all of the lies and awful things he had done and frankly didn't want anything to do with him. He showed up to take my brother and I out to eat and I went simply for the protection of my brother. He took us to McDonald's and refused to make eye contact with me as he spewed lies about wheres he's been, and shared fake promises about all the things he was going to do for us in the future. He the. dropped us back off at home and that is the last time I've seen him to this day.