Dad, Part 1 of…..

…good lord I don’t know how many parts this one may be.

I guess I didn’t feel that the challenge of coming out to Anginae was enough to deal with. I guess I thought it would be a good idea to take on even more in the last few months. But that is exactly what I did. Not that it was really my choice to finally confront the relationship that I have with my dad, but that is what has happened. I didn’t choose to be gay, but the timing to tell Anginae was my decision. The situation with my father presented itself so I have had to deal with it even though the timing really sucks. So here it goes. Hang on, I’m going to try and start from the beginning.

First off, let me say that this has nothing to do with me being gay. The lucky few who are aware of that are my wife, my pastor and Dawg (whom I’ve never met). My mother and father divorced when I was 2 years old. My mother cheated on my dad and left us. She did not take to being a new mother well and was not happy in her marriage. My dad did a pretty good job a raising me by myself. He had some help of course from his parents, but did a lot of the work by himself. I love my father very much, at least that is when he is being the father that I want him to be. I don’t have vivid memories of my mother and father together. Any that I do are after their divorce. They had a civil relationship and I recall my dad taking me to visit her on weekends and us doing stuff together. When I was about 5 or 6, my dad started dating a woman who was divorced with two kids close in my age. She live in a town just west of our and he was introduced to her by my grandfather. They dated for about 3 years and got married when I was 8 years old. I now had a new step-mom, a step brother who was 9 months younger than me and a step sister who was about 3 years older than me. Right after my dad remarried, I went to live with mother.

My step mother has an unbelievably close relationship with her two kids. To this day they live in the same town (in one, case next door), and are in each other’s lives daily. They have what many would consider being the most ideal parent-child relationship you could imagine. It is unlike any other mother and child relationship I have ever known. They are completely open with one another, happy to share all their thoughts and desires. They are completely loyal and selfless towards one another. Not that most mothers love their children dearly, but this is a relationship that I believe few mother’s and their children share (at least that I’ve ever witnessed).

This relationship my step mother and my step siblings had was quite apparent from the beginning. On top of this relationship, my step bother and sister are quite outstanding individuals themselves. The top at whatever they do. If they bother to do anything, school, work, extracurricular activities, and now parenting, they set about the be the best at it. I myself have always been a pretty mediocre person at most things. Not the best at anything I do, but certainly not the worst. I guess I’m average you might call it. With me being just average, I never really felt that I fit in with them. I in no way had a relationship with my dad like they had with their mother. I loved him very much of course, but we did not share the same bond that they had. I’ve always felt my step-mother never really quite knew what to make of me. I never took to her like her own kids did, and I had my own set of self esteem issues that her kids didn’t have which she did not know how to deal with. So because of all this, I believe we both felt uncertain of one another from the very beginning. In all the years leading up to their marriage, I do not recall one single attempt by her to gain a one on one relationship with me.

So, my dad and step-mother decide to get married. At the same time my mother ends a long term, out of state relationship, with another guy and moves back to my home state. I am given the opportunity to go live with her. I’m not going to try and go into the detail of exactly what all goes on around this time. A lot of behind the scenes stuff goes on that I am really not aware of and I get different stories as to how this option presented itself, but all I remember is being asked if I wanted to go live with my mother, I said yes, without a doubt. It was a choice between the unknown of going to a new school in a new town (not far from my dad mind you) or staying with the same school and living in a house where I never felt like I fit in. I had a relationship with my mom. I would stay with her some during the summer so she was a pretty know quantity to me. I knew pretty much what my relationship with her would be like. The choice to me was obvious. I chose my mom.

Now my dad is a bit of a wuss. I am as well. I learned it from him, but I’m not in the same league as he is. I have never once seen him stand up or get angry at my step mother. This characteristic is one that my mother can vouch for. My mom will admit she could be a bitch, and my dad would never fight back with her. It drove her crazy. When my step mom gets mad at him, he basically sulks and mopes. He may get angry, but it’s more at himself because she is angry. He avoids conflict at all costs. However he will start a conflict if my stepmother feels one is warranted. If she feels that she or he is being wronged, she will point it out to make sure that he lets that person know. Imagine being at a restaurant with your significant other gets served a really crappy meal by rude waiter. Your spouse is not shy at all about expressing their displeasure to you about how poorly they are being treated and how wrong that person is. They never tell you to say anything to the waiter, but they are deeply offended and hurt by this poor treatment. But because you know that your spouse is expecting you to uphold their honor, and that you will get the stink eye/silent treatment for the rest of the evening if you don’t, you choose to chew out the waiter for what they did to your spouse, even if you feel strongly about it or not. That’s my dad and step-mother in a nutshell. She can be the most controlling person without ever really being controlling. I hope that makes sense, because it’s that relationship between my dad and my step mother that has ruled my relationship with him and many other’s for most of my life. If she ever feels that I have in any way slighted her or my dad by me or that I did not say or do the right thing in a particular situation, she would never hesitate to express her opinion about it. She would never expressly tell my.  It was alway by proxy through my dad.  And of course, my dad being who he is, would of course see her way and proceed to tell me the err of my ways.

Now I’m sure you may be saying ‘this is what parents are supposed to do; parents are supposed to teach their kids right and wrong and it not always easy for the children to understand’. But thats not really what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about this subtle yet powerful control that they seem to want to exert on me.  They don’t like the idea of me not seeing things the way they want me to see them.  To think of them as selflessly as they do each other.  I guess I just think about myself to much.  Despite my feelings towards them, I have craved my father’s and step mother’s approval like nothing else (especially my step mother).  I have wished like nothing else to see the gleam in their eye for me like they have for my step brother and sister.  I have never felt it and no matter how hard I think that I try I will never get it.

There is much, much more to this, but I can’t go over all this at once.  This is just a bit of background into our relationship.  In the last couple of months I am starting to come to terms with the relationship I have with my dad.  Like coming out to Anginae, the results of this confrontation are yet to be seen.