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Oh Dad, Dear Dad...Mom's hung you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad.

June 24th, 2009 (06:37 pm)

So my Grandmother has been calling and leaving me messages begging me to call my Father for the past few days, because apparently he's going into the hosptial for yet another thing wrong with him. But, it always blows over, so I feel no concern. In fact, I feel very little else for my Father these days but rage and dissapointment.

It wasn't always like this.

( witness my open heart, fuckers. )

Except that it really didn't. He wasn't around much once he moved out, and my Parents firmly seperated and eventually divorced. We saw him every other weekend, which was fine, and even then we did very little because he was poor and sickly. Still is poor and sickly, for that matter. He also took me in when I was an angry seventeen year old rebelling at my Mother and for the first time in my life we finally bonded as people and not as Father and son, and I was vaugely happy with the relationship. We got on well, watched TV and movies together and he taught me the joys of writing recreationally(and, when I was younger, got me hooked on reading). The honest response is that a lot of who I am can be contributed to my Father. Not a lot, since I figured most things about life on my own through a painful process of elimination and a series of personal(and humiliating) failures.

And then my Brother lost his fucking mind.

For those of you who don't know this about me, I have a psychotic younger brother. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when he was about seventeen(I was nineteen) and my Mother has never been able to deal with it very well. Now that he's older things have chilled out due to him going from a young, fit young man with psychotic tendencies to a heavyset lump of vaugely stupid waste....but that isn't the point. The point is that at first Dad was involved with my Brother(though not much, despite the fact that his more even-minded personality was better suited for most of the interactions), and did try to help out a bit.

And then one day he was gone. Dad had moved to the other side of the country to get re-married and raise a new son who allegedly had a genius level intellect. I met the kid, and he loved Pokemon and a pair of stinky rats. Didn't seem all that bright to me. But Dad took off and started a new family, leaving his mentally shattered son, and an ex-wife who was close to an emotional breakdown. And then he more or less vanished. A few phone calls, no letters, no emails, basically he vanished into thin air. After how close he and I had finally become after all the years of vaugely shaky Fathering(despite our similarities, he had no idea on how to raise children or deal with their emotional needs whatsoever), I was rather upset and felt abandoned. In my mind, he just sort of left me. I dealt with it, I was a grown-up(as much as one really can be at Twenty with few real-life experiences) and I moved on. I was already more or less on my own at that point, but I was making a point to spend one evening a week at my Mother's house to visit my brother, which was really not easy.

At one point, after a series of increasingly upsetting episodes, My Mother finally had enough and asked my Father to finally help out in a meaningful way(even though we really hadn't heard from him much in over a year) and my Father volunteered to take my Brother in way off in California for a while. I was impressed. Finally, he was taking some responsibility and I wouldn't have to anymore. My Brother got on a bus and rode off into the sunset to live with Dear Ole' Dad.

He was back two weeks later.

Turns out Dad's new Wife couldn't deal with Little Brother's nutjobbery and made several desperate calls to me to try and convince me that the best thing to do would be to send him back home to Mommy. Desperate calls to ME. Not Mom. ME. Like I was his Father. And all this time, my Dad didn't speak to me, probably because he knew I'd call bullshit on him. My Mother was angry and upset(apparently at least one conversation had occured with her, and she HAD called bullshit on Dad), and I was caught in the middle and was forced to make adult decisions for a bunch of distraught adults over THEIR crazypants son. He was my Brother, but he was their child. But eventually he came back home.

Two months later he violently attacked me and nearly killed me. I defended myself and ended up being arrested as a result due to domestic dispute technicalities. Even though I beat the charges, I was rather upset. After all I had done for him, I was the one who was attacked. And, more specifically, where the fuck was Dad?

Where was he when my Brother was sick? Where was he when we needed a Father to help us through things? Where was he when I was attacked? Why did my Younger Brother feel that I was the male authority figure he could attack? And why did my Mother feel that I was the person to call in the middle of the night worried about my brother? Why did I end up having the parental talks about the psycho who tried to kill me?

Truth is, I'm the one who had to raise my Brother, and I have to take responsibility for how he's turned out. And while I wash my hands of it, because I came to my senses, I find myself thinking about my "son" a lot. And in the meantime, I haven't heard from my Father in years. The last time I called him, probably about eight months ago, we had a decent conversation that was very nice...and he never called me back. So it can't be that he's worried I'm angry, because I didn't give him a reason to think I was.

But my Father abandoned us. If we're so important that I MUST call him for my Grandmother and make sure everything is alright(apparently he wants to know I'm okay before he goes into surgery, because he's melodramatic), then why hasn't he called me about it? If it's so important to him that our relationship be good before he goes into the hospital, why didn't he make the effort? Why hasn't he made the effort over the past five years?

The truth is I don't want to call him. I think he's made it clear that we're only of interest to him when he's feeling self-reflective. And since I did his job for him, what do I need him for? I've been getting along just fine without a Father. And I'm sick of my Grandmother implying I'm a bad son just because I don't make the effort to repair my shattered relationship with my absentee Father. Who has a new Family to worry about. We're his failed experiment Family, and I'm better than that. So, no, I'm not going to call him. I don't care if that's petty, or what, but I don't need it. Any of it. He knows where to find me. But it's his job to do it, not mine. I have enough relationships to deal without worrying about the feelings of a person I barely know who happens to be my genetic donor.

He wants to talk, he can come find me. I'm not hard to find.

But he won't.

He never will.

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Oh Dad, Dear Dad...Mom's hung you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad.

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