I do not like my father.
The realization that your childhood perceptions are incorrect is a cruel and stark epiphany. The entire world ceases to have meaning as the mind is consumed with speculations of what other facts could be untrue. As a child, I perceived my father as a protector, being a 200-plus pound male who only attended college because he received a full-ride scholarship to play football. He kept “bad guys” away and as long as he was near, no hurt could reach me. A caring man; someone whom I would run to immediately everyday as soon as he set one foot inside our small house in Westminster, Colorado.
Upon pondering life as high-school seniors do, questioning what they’ve accomplished, what they want to do for the rest of life and how they fit into this overpopulated world where everything has been done, I stumbled upon a memory I always remembered but could never remember why I remembered it. But after living the past seventeen years with my father, wrestling with how I perceive him as a man and as a father figure, my mind pieced together the realization I was unconsciously desperate to refuse: I do not like my father. Love is one thing, something that binds us together and connects us despite our pleas for release, but liking someone is a different category entirely. It’s a conscious choice of the mind and soul. Remembering that conspicuously hidden memory forced this realization into my mind and gave existence to the suppressed emotions I had been harboring since that day of distressing comprehension.

The breath stuck to my cotton candy coated teeth.
While I am lucky enough to call my only sibling one of my best friends, little sisters are bound to annoy their big sisters. It’s natural, one of the gifts of life: knowing how to push the buttons of those you love. Pestering my sister was a childhood talent I cherished as one of the few things I was good at.
I was bored and boredom gives way to desperate behavior. My relentless impatience clashed with her patient nature many times, but it would prove to be the undoing of the image I fostered of my father.
Looking around a book and music store was pointless. Being confined indoors away from the rides and sweaty men in jumbo character suits was not what people did on vacations at theme parks. I resolved the problem of my futile and ignored whining by repeating the same phrase over and over again until my sibling’s patience was at a standstill.However, it wasn’t my sister who finally cracked under my persistent poking, prodding, and overall highly irritating harassment, but my father. Seizing my neck, he dragged me out of the store, across the street and into the shadows of the nearest bathroom. What his actual words were I have forgotten but they are unimportant. A stern voice and short temper are his defining characteristics, so all the bursts of anger that occur almost daily have blurred together into one orb of confusion and pain, inseparable from their fellow companions.
It was the actual act of choking me across a street in front of many onlookers, complete with cotton candy coated teeth and light up balloons even though it was midday, which ignited my ability to assess him as human being. To view him with lenses liberated from the restraining blindfolds of love. My childhood mind dismissed his genuine unkindness as a characteristic all fathers possessed. Dad is irritable and despises alcohol and prefers watching sporting events on a giant flickering box than doing arts and crafts with me and mom, therefore all other father figures must think and act the same way. Parents are made from the same stone but are on opposite sides, mothers are polished and fathers are rough. That’s how my young mind coped with the mood swings and aggressive behavior. Reality did not extend beyond the limitations of my house.
How devastatingly wrong childhood thoughts can be.

I do not draw family portraits.
Just recently I stumbled into yet another aha moment that has shaken the foundations of my existence, sending trembling vibrations into connecting branches of my life and spitting out new questions and memories. The night before the feast of all feasts, the Thanksgiving gorge day, my dad starts an argument in the car with my sister who rarely ever comes home. No, he says, absolutely no way will you ever have a gay roommate. I meditate in the back seat and drown out the rest of the heated conversation, eager to get to our destined restaurant because dad never likes to publicly display arguments.
But not this time. He carries it into the wood paneled eatery and refuses to let it go – he is always right, end of story, goodbye, the end. After seeing that no one else surrounding the tiled table agrees with his obviously correct viewpoint, he begins to say things he should never utter. A technique he has mastered for desperate times like this one where no one will hear his obviously correct opinion. He discloses a few secrets concerning him and my mother, no remorse coloring his face as my mother flushes and tears sprinkle her eyes, and I realize something.
My parents should never have gotten married.
A rash decision by my father and a guilty, reluctant acceptance by my mother. Now we are living out their mistake and provide a prime example of a traditional American family: the father who commits all his energy to his work, the morbidly obese child who smothers her emotions by gorging on fictional characters, the overachieving child who derives her physical image from popular media, and a savior of a mother who fights her damnedest to keep it all together. Who ever thought I would be a part of this disturbing stereotype? I suppose my six-year-old self should have, never playing with the daddy dollhouse figure and usually depicting the daddy with a briefcase or pen behind his ear in family drawings.
Now I don’t draw family pictures or play with plastic dolls, but that underlying feeling of neglect remains. Now I hear my mom sniveling quietly, trying to hide leaking, red eyes from mine, claiming that onions have always made her eyes water. Now dad asks her how long it’s going to take for her to leave him after I graduate. The reaper of punishment has been very kind to our family in the past twenty years.
I return home that night and sit for hours pondering my existence. I find myself blessed. I am healthy, strong-minded, and have plenty of daily comforts and necessities, especially when taking into consideration that my family is supported by the salaries of two teachers who come from rather low-class families themselves. A comfortable life indeed.
Just subtract the abusive parent.

No physical wounds scar my flesh.
Mental scars left in the wake of fear and confusion are what do the real damage. They plant thoughts within my plagued mind – but everyone says your father is so amazing, they all love him, he’s a very funny guy, he’s a great teacher, he really isn’t that terrible, just angry… a lot. If he played poker, he’d be one of the men on TV, the ones who win cash prizes and fancy cars because he could fool them all. His poker face is impeccable.
But my battered emotional and mental sanity have been stitched and re-stitched together by my savior of a mother time after time.






After time.
A mother that gave up a career in the FBI to be a stay-at-home mom, who then got a job as a second-grade teacher at the same private school my sister and I attended, who then quit so she could home school us for three years, who now is an instructor at a community college. A mother who gave up all her ambitions for a promising career to be with her two daughters and, quoting Beloved, tells us we are her “best thing.” A mother who never divorced my father because she wanted to protect us; she would be unhappy but at least she would be around. Mom is selfless and kind and supportive and nurturing and… loving, all the characteristics that would be absent in my house without her. She is the antithesis of dad. Opposites attract but only for a period of time. Eventually the two dueling natures will repel only to leave brokenness in the aftermath.

Forgiveness is for the victim.
I make good choices. I consciously observe what is wrong and fix it; whether that be handing out sandwiches to the homeless or returning abandoned carts that sit in the middle of parking spaces to their proper home, I am proud to be a doer and a relatively moralistic seventeen-year-old.
But every day I struggle with what is “good”. Right and wrong are distinguishable. Unconditional love: right, child abuse: wrong. Giving: right, stealing: wrong. Bluegrass: right, rap: wrong. Good and bad are more of a gray area. Is it bad to foster anger towards my only dad? Is it bad to wish I had a different father? Am I aggravating the already aggravated situation? If these questions were professional wrestlers, they would take me out in five seconds. Game, set, match.
The phrase “forgive and forget” frustrates me. One of the hardest aspects of life is forgiving those who wronged you. Perhaps some people don’t deserve forgiveness. Some acts are so vicious that they are impossible to forget. But forgiveness is for the victim. Dad will continue to disappoint and use his family as an emotional punching bag irregardless of my forgiveness.
It’s not for him, it’s for me.


I have lost the childhood image of my father.
Nothing but disappointment ahead
A need to forgive
Sister, mother and me

Father
Arm in arm in arm

In arm
We walk
No more cotton candy stained breath.