What a fucked week when it comes to emotional stuff. The anniversary of the death of my first love and best friend was this week. And Father’s Day where I am reminded that I have never had a strong father figure. Where the fuck did the time go? It’s been a year since I had that weird premonition that my father was going to die. Sometime in July last year I woke up with the feeling that my father had died. I was out of contact with him due to anger at his continued drug addiction. He dies in October. Before he died it was pills instead of cocaine, but the effects were still the same. He was lying saying he needed money for his prescriptions, pawning stuff so that he could get money for the pills. When I finally found out that he kept asking for money because he was abusing pills, not because he didn’t have enough for his prescription I had a hard time talking to him anymore. I now wish I had reached out when I had the premonition. I would have still had time to at least see if he had matured and if reconciliation was possible. However, simultaneously I can’t help but think if it had been me, I would have reached out more aggressively and even come out to visit. He and my sister were still in regular contact. He could have figured out how to come visit while he was still relatively healthy.
For years I’ve been clinging to the fact that I have a “surrogate” father constantly trying to ignore the fact that there’s nothing father-like about him. My biological father left me with him when I was 12/13. My mother was in jail and my father was living in his car and decided to move to back to his birth state of Missouri where he could live with relatives. I was already staying with the surrogate anyway. My sister was too young to want to deal with a sibling 6 years younger than her and my grandparents were indifferent and passive. It’s weird to me now that no one thought it was inappropriate for a 13-year-old to live with a 27-year-old who was not a relative. A person they met online through a local BBS. A lot of gross stuff happened to me in that house I live with him in. He never noticed, and I never said anything. To this day, the surrogate father is around and it’s only been in the last 4 years that I have really noticed just how much he has never grown up. How many similarities there are to my biological father. He doesn’t do drugs, but he doesn’t seem to be able to think things through. My wife, he, and I bought a house together because out here in California, it’s kinda the only way unless you pull down tons of money.
We have chickens and recently it seemed like either they weren’t laying or that something could have perhaps stolen their eggs. I didn’t want chickens but he and my wife seemed to want them bad enough to agree to do all the work. Until recently pushing the issue, my wife was the one doing everything while he gets lost in a sea of Anime and whatever other media he is consuming at the time. He said he looked and saw no breaches in their coop, but when I went down and looked there was a gaping hole that some rats had chewed through. We live in the mountains in a forest and rats are definitely an issue when you have chickens. The hole was very obvious, large, and near the coup door that is frequently accessed in order to refill their food and water. This is just an example of the obvious things he misses. He also let his cat piss all over the carpet in his bedroom closet and it is absolutely disgusting. I am finding that I constantly have to clean up after him, deal with all the house stuff — to be the “man of the house.” And he is a perpetual teenager. It’s like he is my son or brother, rather than him being a parent figure. He likes to tout around the words “father” and “son,” but never lives up to the title.
Last year at my birthday he ate his vegan cupcakes before it was time for cake and just ignored me when I tried to bring it up.
When we tried to have a shared birthday I asked him to watch the grill so I could interact with my godson, and he said sure but ultimately let everything burn. He also ignored that. He can never celebrate anybody without being begged to, and even then it always falls flat. Unless he can throw money at it, he doesn’t seem capable of thinking about anyone other than himself.
So this Father’s Day I have no father. I am not going out of my way to celebrate anything or anyone. On my birthday this year, I am doing whatever I want, with my wife if she doesn’t have to work, but otherwise, I am going to put the effort in where effort is returned and learn how to celebrate myself.
Chestnut Cowboy 