Blogger’s note: This is angsty as hell. I know I already said that in the content warnings, but I mean like whiniest-emo-song-you’ve-ever-heard-in-your-life level of angsty. But my therapist recently suggested it wouldn’t be a horrible idea to write more to help process some of my trauma. So I guess this is that? In any case, writing this felt… odd. Maybe cathartic? Definitely anticlimactic. But maybe processing trauma isn’t supposed to feel climactic?

(Also, my dad’s not dead. He’s just awful.)

‍

Happy 69th birthday to my dad. Wish I could remember the good times, but instead what I’m remembering is:

• How much he made my mom cry before they were divorced, and how in the years after he would feed me and my brother lies about things my mom did or said
• How during his custody-granted weekends, I was given the choice between either watching a super age-inappropriate movie or sitting in a room all by myself in his house in the middle of the woods while still very clearly hearing the movie because of his jacked-up surround sound volume, and thus:
  • I saw Poltergeist when I was 3, resulting in the beginning of the chronic nightmares and insomnia I still have, and also I was afraid trees were trying to eat me (something that sounds silly now but was not at all silly then)
  • I saw Jurassic Park when I was 3, contributing to said nightmares
  • I saw It when I was 7, and I developed a fear of indoor plumbing (also sounds silly now, but, again, certainly not at the time)
  • I saw The Sixth Sense when I was 9, and became afraid people were trying to poison me (see above parenthetical)
  • I saw various other horror movies and also films with mature sexual content at much-too-young an age
• How when I was a sickly but not-yet-diagnosed child, he regularly accused me of “faking it for attention”
• How after I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when I was 9, he repeatedly told me, “Mind over matter”
• How, after he married my now-ex-step mom, he would fight with her almost every waking hour whether or not my brother and I were there, so I’d regularly hear them screaming at each other (blogger's note: I didn't know where to put the hyphens for "ex-step-mom" because like it could be "ex-step mom" or "ex step-mom" too, but none of them really feel right. I almost wrote "former" instead but it felt very formal.)
• How when he wasn’t yelling at my ex-step-mom he was saying really sexist cruel things about her to anyone and everyone (me included)
• How he encouraged me to read his self-published autobiography when I wasn’t even a teen, which included sexual content about my mom, as well as accusations of an affair (that didn’t happen—he just assumed that the only way she, a woman with a college degree, could get a job was through sleeping with the boss)
• How he was often rude to service people
• How he always ordered his drinks "easy ice" and now I hate that I don't like that much ice in my drinks, if at all
• How he made that bank teller cry that one time (probably more than once, but I only remember the once)
• How it felt sitting in the front room of my mom’s house waiting for him to pick me up on a designated weekend, just for him to neither show nor call (which happened a lot)
• How it felt for him to instead disrupt a school day and pull me out of elementary school to take me to McDonald’s, and then bring me back to class and make promises he had no intention of keeping (like how he'd be there to pick me up next time)
• How unsafe I felt that one time we were all in Florida on vacation—I couldn't have been older than 10, but I can’t remember my age—and I was really afraid of the scary movie he, my brother, and my half-sister were watching on TV, and then we went to bed and the lights were turned off, and I was lying awake heart racing, really scared, and then he snuck out of bed, crawled over, and jumped up and yelled to (successfully) scare me and everybody laughed like it was ok and normal and funny for a dad to prey his on child's fear for jokes
• How teenage me told him that my brother—his son, to be clear—had been sexually abusive to me when we were younger, and he didn’t do anything with that knowledge, probably planning to take it to the grave
• How when I finally broke my silence about the abuse a few years later following a deep depression, he told me I shouldn’t have ever told anyone, that I should’ve kept it to myself, that it was my problem, that I was ruining my brother’s life
• How when I confronted him about knowing, he said he didn't do anything because it "wasn't anyone else's business"
• How once, when I was in my early 20s, he forgot my birthday and then blamed me for it
• How, in the few years that followed (before I decided to stop speaking to him), he’d call me on my birthday just to berate me and make me cry
• How I was relieved that, when Robbie and I decided to move up our wedding and semi-elope, we chose a date he was unavailable for, so it gave me an easy out to not have him there
• How I know he knew when I was critically ill, and I know he knew I almost died, and he never reached out or acknowledged it
• How I found out from the news that he was at the insurrection—not because he was arrested or anything, but because he called the news so they’d feature him so he could be locally famous. He told them "it wasn't as bad as everyone else was saying" but that he left early (sure, Jan)
• How he was, and I think still is, dating a married woman whose son is a domestic terrorist who drove into BLM protestors and also was stockpiling weapons in order to create a pro-Trump militia training camp  
• How we haven’t spoken in almost a decade and I don’t regret a day of it—and I still wouldn't regret it if I found out he'd died
• How it feels really fucking unfair to have lost both of my in-laws while he’s still breathing
• How I feel like I have to pay rent for his existence in my head. But that’s how trauma works, I guess
  

So, yeah. Happy birthday to my dad. See him never.