As many , if not all of you, are aware , I have had a very complicated and difficult relationship with my father for much of my life. For those of you who are new , or who just haven't found my rants about my life yet ( buried deep among the many many other things on my blog ) , I'll re-cap: My father has been emotionally, psychologically, and verbally abusive toward me for the last 14 years of my life. When I was 9, my mother died suddenly from bacterial meningitis , and losing her broke my father. He's been different ever since. Before she died, he was very kind and gentle , but after she died, he become angry and bitter. Suddenly I found myself dealing with a father who blamed me for anything wrong in his life , a father who constantly berated me for any mistake , a father who told me he hated me far more often than he told me he loved me. Since my mother's loss, I can count on one hand the number of times my father said ' I love you' and I believed him. But I could list dozens of times when he spat hate and vicious words and I believed every syllable. It's taken me a long time to get brave enough to leave home and get away from him. And now , even after I've moved to a new home far from him , I still feel he's just at the edge , ready to make me miserable again. I.... I wish I hated him. That would make it so much easier to just cut him off entirely. But despite all the awful things he's said and done , I still care about him. I still remember the father who called me his angel , his life's greatest joy. I still remember his fond hugs , his forehead kisses and the way he'd read to me late into the night. So I still call home , I talk to my siblings and my father. I love my siblings so much , and I can't bear to cut them off. But they still live with him , so to talk to them I have to call him, and hope he lets me talk to them before I have to speak very long with him. Conversation with my father is like walking across a minefield ; you never know which part of the ground is SAFE. There's always the lingering threat. The fear that one wrong word will set him off. He's pleasant , but the type of pleasant that you know is only a mask. Lately when I've spoken with him , he's been commenting slyly about how my " short experience away " hasn't been a huge success . He says that because I've got a roommate and a minimum wage job , I can't be doing well. I can't afford a car , I don't have insurance yet , and I haven't figured out yet what I want to do in life. My father only ever focuses on the negative things , the things he views as wrong. And he sees everything I do as wrong. I'm finally starting to get to a healthy place emotionally, but every time I have to talk to my dad , all my progress is lost because I suffer from depression and it doesn't take much to send me into a spiral of despair. And my anxiety doesn't help either. But recently I've been reading , and reading again , a series of fan fictions that have quite honestly taught me a lot. @rangergirl3 your Lost Paladins series has helped me to realize that I can let go of my father, and that it's not wrong for me to do so. Family is more than blood and genetic relations. Family is just a group of people who care about you and do their best to help you be your best. So thank you for that. Keith's character arc in your stories has helped me work through many of my own issues. I'm going to slowly distance myself from my father for my own sake.
