The Girl With The Past

When It All Fell Apart

My dad died when I was 3.

Some say since I was so young it shouldn't affect me the way it did. And you guys may be right if you knew more. My mom is my legal guardian. That is about all she is to me. She was an okay parent, I guess. We had everything we needed when we needed it. But that was to the extent of a parent she was.

When my dad died, it really hurt my mom. Even to this day, she will not talk about it. I remember my dads funeral. I wish I didn't considering I was young but some things you just can't forget. And this is one of those things. When my dad wasn't in jail or drinking, he lived with me and my mom and my siblings at my grandmas house. The house we all grew up it. She bought that house for a dollar way back when, so that should give you an idea of how old this house was.

On the day of my dads' funeral, the house was kind of in a glum state. It wasn't a shock, but it also wasn't a good moment. We knew it was going to affect us one way or another, whether it was positive or negative? We had no clue. What does it really mean when someone dies? To me, you lose apart of you that you will never get back.

They took apart of you and you will never have that back. That is why you change when someone dies or leaves your life. They took a piece of you, which means you will NEVER be whole in your entire life. From one day, you are born to lose pieces of yourself. I learned this the hard way through my entire life. When my dad died, the atmosphere changed. My siblings tried to make it seem like we could just bounce back and everything could be fine. And in a way as I grew up, I thought we could fix it. I really thought we did. But as I got older.. I realized a lot of things have changed. My mom became a person who scared me. She worked nights so she was never home at night, and when she was at home during the day she was either sleeping or at one of the kids games. All of my moms kids did SOMETHING sports related. It has always been that way. I know most parents put their kids in sports but it got out of hand. We all did multiple sports. At the age of 3 my mom put me into teeball. I loved it. I was good at it. But to my mom, that wasn't good enough. Every year, I would go back. Every.Single.Year.

To me, sports was fun. But to my mom, it was a whole different ball game. Ha, get it. Ball game? Like baseball? Okay sorry, that was my bad attempt at trying to be funny. Back to the stuff you probably want to read, I played baseball for 13 years after that. About my 3rd year of baseball, my mom put me into basketball. I hated it and wasn't very good at it. But I stayed after practices and tried to get better. It just wasn't something I loved so I had no drive to do it. And all that did was upset my mom. So about 6 years into sports, that would make me 9 at this point, I started swimming. Now I was doing swimming, basketball, and baseball. On top of all of this I had school and was doing extra curricular activities. I was doing anything I could to make my mom happy. I was really trying. But it just never seemed good enough. A year after swimming, I started soccer. So now, I was going between swimming practices, basketball practices or training depending on the time of year, soccer practices and games, and of course baseball. But not once did I complain.

To me, sports were my outlet. I was good at it. But eventually my mom took all of that fun away from me. To this day, I dread playing sports. She made me seem like I always had to win. And no kid should feel like since I got second I am a failure. He is something that will put this into perspective, just like the movie Talladega Nights states, "If you aren't first then you are last." Sports became a chore to me. I was spending more time practicing, training, and going to games then I was on spending it with friends and being a kid. As I grew up, when I got to middle school it was still my priority to be in sports. Sports gave me a reason to be someone. It gave me an outlet most things didn't. But on the other hand, I also loved photography and writing. But that wasn't good enough for anyone so I dropped it and focused on sports and school. As the years progressed, my mom got more depressed and more angry. But no one could point it out because she would just say it was an off day or she did not feel good. And I knew, I always knew, she was never happy. But I left it alone.. the worst mistake of my life.

My mom is one of the parents that everyone loves when they meet because she was so chill. But once they left.. we knew it wasn't okay. We knew she wasn't okay. Some days she would just ignore me and that was fine, I got used to it. But other days she would be so triggered that it scared me.. When I was in 5th grade, my mom up and moved me and my nephew and her to Florida with her boyfriend and his daughter. I had no say in any of this. I came home from school one day and the next thing I know, I am getting in a car saying goodbye to my friends as I leave the one place I can call home.