Helping Hand
I am 18 years old and my parents have been separated for 15 of them. I have no true memory of my mom and dad sharing a home with our family, together. You don’t realize at a young age that your parents were nowhere near ready to start a family when they did nor did they have the slightest clue how to form a strong minded and intelligent kid. Doing this as a couple is a challenge enough, but with a divorce and my folks’ horrible ability to co- parent, it became a mess.
Middle school was normal like any other kid. I played baseball year round and had a passion for being on the diamond. My father also grew up playing baseball so he loved attending my games. Around the time I turned 13, I no longer enjoyed playing sports. My school was rather huge and the talent available was better than anything I even strived to be. When there were no longer sporting events to attend, my father’s absence in my life became apparent. I went from seeing him roughly 4 days a week to almost nothing at all. Birthdays and holidays became the only times my sister and I could see him. We would overhear phone calls between our parents discussing things that my father was struggling with. He would complain that the child support payments were weighing him down and that they were a ridiculous amount of money. My father was never shy about his money, he would show my sister and I his paycheck each week and tell us to strive to make that much. I began to question why he was worried about the money. After asking my mom, I found out my father had been fired from his job and was in crippling gambling debt.
This new information sat in the depths of my stomach for weeks. Even though my relationship with him was never the greatest, I still felt worried for him. Months would go by where our only form of communication would be by phone call, even though my father only lived 45 minutes away from my sister and me. It’s a challenge as a child to see your friends being treated as a priority by their parents. It makes you feel as if less people are there to catch you if you fall. My mother did all she could to try and close the void in our lives, but unfortunately she is a cold woman by nature. She always provided the necessities, but emotional support and inspirational moments were rare.
My sister and I would occasionally spend weekends with my father. These times were jammed full of doing nothing but watching ESPN reruns and playing video games. Small talk lingered in the air of the front room, yet we all stayed silent. I felt awkward around my own father and conversation always seemed forced. It amazed me how clueless my father was that all I wanted was for him to care about me. His mental state became worse and worse by the day until he became clinically depressed. His attitude towards life began to crush my own. My grades started slipping and I developed some bad habits. I started choosing the easy way out of everything I did because fear of failure scared me. I constantly looked at my parents for validation that everything was going to be fine, but another birthday with a homemade cake and cards from my dad without money in them made me feel otherwise.
I graduated high school only to be rewarded with a discount lunch special at a buffet while I watched as my friends had huge parties where they received thousands of dollars from supportive family members. The distance of treatment between our lives was vastly different and I recognized it. I blamed my actions on the mistakes of others and passed guilt for years until I realized I had turned into the exact thing I hated the most.
After some therapy, I learned that, as children, we model our behaviors after the people we think about the most. I did not idolize my father, but his condition always weighed heavy on me. The constant fear and anxiety guided my life. Currently, I am back on track towards improving my own mental health. I see a therapist regularly and try to keep my anxiety at bay through working out and my job. My upbringing was not the smoothest, but I have made it this far. My life has much more for me in store and maybe one day I’ll be able to be the father to lay out the helping hand.
This story was written by Jacob Crowley based on an interview with an anonymous contributor. The story and its content belong to the contributor.
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