My dad is one of the most important people in my life. He has helped me more than anybody ever has. I know some people think that should be normal, given that he’s my father, but we’ve come a long way to get to this point. Like a large chunk of people, my father is a veteran. He joined in the 90’s, serving for roughly 18 years. He served through the gulf war, deploying overseas for three main trips. He’s been blown up, shot at, seen people die in front of him. He’s had to take lives. As one would assume, that changes a person. My father is one of the vast number of veterans that have developed PTSD from their time in the military. This made it hard for us to have a good relationship during my more adolescent years. My mother is also a highly manipulative person, and forced my dad into working 2 jobs to support her career as a babysitter. Needless to say, he had it pretty rough through most of my childhood.

My pops and I didn’t have much of a relationship for a while. Given his PTSD, working 60 hours a week, and being mostly alone in his battle, it was difficult to catch him in a mood that wasn’t sour. We fought, yelled a ton. For most of my time growing up, I didn’t feel like my dad loved me too much. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t do anything to change my opinion towards him. She would trash talk him constantly, complaining about him never being home. I took all of it to heart and began to strongly dislike my father. My feelings for him reached their worst when my mother told me and my older brother that my dad cheated on her, via email. With this information in mind, I began to hate my dad. Every wrong thing he did would become concrete evidence against him being a terrible dad. I thought that I had every reason to believe that he was no good. We played this game for roughly 3 years, constantly bickering and fighting. It took a very rough injury on my part for us to patch our problems.

A few months into my sophomore year, I got pretty seriously injured while working out. Some obscure back injury, none of the initial scans found anything worth pointing out. But the pain was kickin’. More often than not, I was stuck in bed, unable to move without aggravating the problem severely. Throughout the course of 6 months or so, I got better, then worse, then better again, then even worse after that. While I was taking a ride on this roller coaster from hell, my father was working on being a better person. With my mom going into nursing school, my dad had to find a job that allowed him to work from home. Now, initially, I dreaded Dad being the parent that was home all of the time. Given my past and, at the time, present experience with my pops, I wasn’t too keen on him being around 24/7. Regardless, life moved on and he got a job that allowed him to be home almost every day. Around this same time, he started getting help for his PTSD. He found a group of veterans that he could talk to, and he slowly started to change. He went from a man that was easy to anger and loud, to a gentle giant of sorts. Mind you, I say giant with much exaggeration, as I tower over this man.

Despite him being vertically challenged, he is very strong and physically intimidating, so his change in demeanor was especially hard to get used to. He stopped yelling as much. He let my little brothers be loud and obnoxious when they were playing, instead of scolding them. He went way out of his way any and every time I would fall due to my injury or when I needed to get somewhere and couldn’t move too well. He went from a man that only had time for work and sleep, to a man that balanced it all.

Throughout the course of my mother going back to school, she decided that she wanted a do-over, and chose to leave. It was a slow process, starting with her not being around, always being out with friends. Eventually, she broke the news to my younger brothers, who took it about as well as you would expect a child to. She moved out, and we still don’t see her much. The process is still ongoing, with the divorce being finalized soon. And yet, with all of this happening, he continues to keep a cool head. He’s one of the best at his job, we live better than we did when our mom was the main parent, and he’s always there for us.