February 26th, 1997. I enter the world to find that my father will soon leave mine. Obviously because of my infancy there's not much that I remember from the time, but it would mold who I became as a person. My Dad's appearance in my childhood was slim, until my parents officially got divorced and custody agreements were made. I was 5. In my mind, he had abandoned me as a child. To much extent, that's very true, but the times he was there I can't say I was very fond of either. He was such a horrible, inattentive, uncaring, cold person that the house he owns, I will never consider a home. A home, to me, is where a family lives. A house is where people live. It goes back much further than me though. My Mother is a saint for putting up with him as long as she did. My Mom is a saint in general. I can't say enough about how much she did for us (my siblings and I) as kids. She worked multiple jobs with 18 hour days, 7 days a week, just to keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs. She did so without a single complaint as well. She just viewed it as what she needed to do to provide for the people she cared about. The life of a single mother is a slow-taking suicide. When times got tough, so did we, but we always managed to get through it. No matter how many loans or jobs it took. My Father on the other hand, is a deadbeat. Every time he'd get a job, news that he got fired from it would always come soon afterwards. He had substance abuse problems, but those were nothing compared to the drinking problem that he had. He'd start the day with rum in coffee, and drive my brother and sister to school after doing so. I read a book called "The Rum Diaries" and laughed the whole time because it sounded like my Dad. He had gambling problems and cheated on my Mom more than frequently. He met his current wife during my Mom's pregnancy of my, now, 14 year old little sister. He's not only a bad person, but a bad Dad. He was constantly judging and critiquing everything my siblings and I did, and nothing was ever good enough. Eventually we all just stopped trying. There was no point in trying to appease the unappeasable.
My Dad would often times disappear for weeks on end and leave my brother, my Mom, and I stranded at the house with no money. Things got better in a sense after the divorce. We didn't have to deal with him anymore, but that threw everything on my Mom's shoulders. She now had to support us all. We left because he wouldn't. We couldn't be there anymore and looking back, I wouldn't have it any other way. My sister was a baby at the time of the divorce and we moved in with my Grandparents temporarily. A falling out occurred between my Mom and my Grandma and we left. We moved in with my Aunt and Uncle for a substantial amount of time before tensions got too high and we had the funds to get our own place. We moved into a small, mobile home in a neighborhood overlooking The Sound. It wasn't a motorhome or anything. It was just like a house, but it was held up by bricks rather than a conventional foundation. I always thought it gave the house more character. It inspired me a tiny bit; the thought that if a home could be held up by such a seemingly weak foundation, then I could too. Life became better as we got closer as a family. We needed to get over the tragedy that had just taken place and we did so with eachother. We were so close in those days. It's amazing how strife brings people together. It seems to happen constantly throughout history and everyday life. I remember waking up, virtually every morning, and walking into the TV room to watch Cartoons with the family. We gave eachother comfort in the sense that we were all in the same boat, whether we liked it or not. Our life that we had built had been burned to ground in front of us and we were expected to just keep going. So we did. We weren't ready to give up because we were still stronger than that. The neighborhood we lived in had plenty of kids in it, but i wasn't interested in them. I was more infatuated with the feeling of wonder and belonging to something. I rode my bike aimlessly through the neighborhood everyday. I didn't have a destination. I didn't have a goal. I just wanted to be out and alone. That's always the way that I dealt with issues and explored my thoughts. I was stuck in my head back then much in the same way that I currently am. The thoughts just sit there in my head, growing until they force themselves out. I said that my family and I were very close during this time, but that doesn't mean that we were okay. Often times that's how things go, you have to feel the way that you feel until you just don't anymore. The enduring of pain that you do is what makes you stronger as a person, but it can also make you much more of a cynical and cold person. Perspective is key.
What nobody prepares you for is the pain. Nobody tells you that you're going to live most of your life questioning it. Nobody tells you that when you're up it's never as good as it seems and when you're down you're down it seems like you're never going to be up again. When making a realization such as that it makes me wonder why we even live life in the first place. If the good things are temporary and the bad things are just waiting on their chance to strike, then why even bother? It'd be much easier to turn yourself off. I don't understand why life is able to just bring you down for no reason and without justification, but it is. The only thing that you can really do is condition yourself for disappointment. Which is why I have a problem with optimism. Optimism is defined as a hopefulness or confidence about the success of future events. There is something inherently wrong that. Why force yourself to believe that everything is going to be okay when you know full well that they're not nor are they going to be. The presence of the hope optimism creates is what makes inevitable despair even more detrimental. Life doesn't have the luxury of absolute foresight. I understand the desire of wanting life to be guaranteed to be okay, but half the fun of the future is the process of getting there. the mistakes you make on the way, the lessons that you learn, and the changes you make are the most important things that you will ever undergo. There's only so much that you can do before you have to accept the fact that ultimately you are powerless to control the future. There are very few things in life that you can guarantee and the future is not among them. So why keep trying? The fact that you aren't actually in control of your own life to a certain extent is a terrifying thought. A thought that I think a lot of people have difficulty grasping.
The only way to control your own life is to stop fighting it. Life continues to throw me curve balls in the form of girlfriends, growing up, and misery as I continue to endure and overcome it. Surviving is more painful than death in the sense that the scars are visible. You have to live with the memories of the crap that happened, but the lessons that you learned are what's important. those are the things that you should hold onto more than anything. Even the memory. Life moves on. it may seem like it's going to end, but you owe it to yourself to make it through whatever is making it end. Surviving is the most important thing you can learn how to do. You would be doing yourself a disservice to not experience everything that life has to offer. Both the bad and the good. You can't have one without the other, and I don't know why you'd want to. To take away any emotion is to take away from being human.
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