It takes a man to be a father, but an even bigger man to father a child who did not have one to begin with.
This definitely was not the way I wanted to start this blog, but here I am at 2:30 in the morning with the urge to write some thoughts down, so to speak. I had a general plan in mind for this page. A large list of topics and everything. I have been wanting to start this thing for the past couple of months but kept finding myself procrastinating it because I guess I was just too afraid to start something that I might not end, even with the list in mind. I'm not exactly sure if that's the precise reason, but it suffices for now.
For those who are reading this and do not personally know me, or even those who know me well and just did not find out from conversation with me, I started writing mainly poems, with a couple paragraphs of various short stories scattered throughout, in middle school. And I only fell in love with it because of a friend who lived across the street from me at the time, named Megan, and an even better friend, at one time she was even my best friend, named Etta Long. They loved writing even more than I did and they kept encouraging me to write as often as possible, as well as striving to become even better than I thought I could ever be. I definitely looked up to them when it came to matters of pen and paper.
I ended up moving 4 hours away the summer before the eighth grade. That was kind of a big thing for a 13 and a half year old who had lived in the same place all of her life up til that point. I tried to continue writing as I had, but I just simply fell out of it somewhere between the tenth and eleventh grade. School work became more intense and I became alienated from both writing and reading for fun. So, after that probably-boring-to-everyone-else-but-me story, now you know how strange it is for me to write something that is not school-related. Very strange. The only reason I am doing so is because of my father. And if you could not figure it out from that little sentence at the top of this post, the one I called my father was not blood-related to me.
My "sperm donor", as I typically think of him, abandoned me, as well as my mom, shortly after I was born. He barely made what others call an "effort" to contact me. To give you some sort of perspective, I think he has only seen my twice, the last time being when I was about 5, or somewhere around that age, and has only tried to contact me personally once (that I can remember), through a Facebook friend request of all things. Oh, and he has his own family off in California somewhere, complete with the kids that he planned on having, I guess. I'll most likely go into more detail about my thoughts of him in a post sometime down the road. He doesn't matter right now (or really ever), so I'll continue trying to get to the point.
The only emotionally beneficial thing he ever did for me was unintentionally cause my mom, via the "domino effect", to fall in love with the one I called "Daddy". He was just everything to my mom and I, although at about 5-years-old, I was not exactly receptive of him when he first entered my life. The earliest memory I have of my father was when I called him by his first name and my mom told me to start calling him "Dad". Or at least something along those lines. I'm pretty sure that happened, but I have a terrible memory and it often happens between my best friend and I that I "remember" things that either did not happen, or only happened in a dream (is anyone else reminded of "Sleeping Beauty"?).
Anyways, he was our missing puzzle piece. Now, getting to what this post is really about, he died on Valentine's Day, 2011. Devastation was an understatement. It's been 5 and a half months. It feels like yesterday. At 6:03pm to be exact. I think of him every day and this still does not feel like it's real. He took trips every once in a while to visit his brothers where we used to live, usually about a week or so at a time, and that's what it's felt like since February 14th. It's like he'll be back any day now. Any day now. You know, he still holds an assigned speed dial number on my phone. And I still remember exactly what it felt like to hold his hand, knowing that he was going to leave soon, while he laid in his hospital bed, brain dead. He worked hard all his life and that showed through his rough hands and arms, covered with bruises, scars, and the occasional scratches from our Chihuahuas. Yes, I just wrote Chihuahuas. And whenever I think of him laying in the hospital, my mind immediately goes to the multiple times that my mom hysterically cried out "What am I going to do?!" Out of anything I could possibly think of in relation to his death, the thought of my mom crying out like that instantly makes me want to cry. In those moments, it felt like losing a husband was a lot more terrible than losing the only man who wanted to be my father, thus I decided that I had to try as hard as I could not to cry, for her. I wanted to be strong for my mom. She is my everything and I knew that if I cried just like she was in front of her, it would hurt her many times worse than it already did. For the first time, I felt like I was the mom and she was the child that I had to take care of and comfort. To get into that mindset, I had to force myself to somewhat remove my emotions for the time being. And maybe that's why I cry just as hard now as I did the week after he left, I don't know. Or maybe it's that way for everyone. I honestly have no idea. Either way, I wanted to make this post because I'm tired of not saying what's on my mind all the time.
P.S. In case you were wondering, it's now about 3:50 am.
