I'm going to type this out and probably delete but it's going to be a doozy. For me anyway.
I don't have the best relationship with my dad. I know, what son does right? He left when I was 11 years old and just starting puberty and I'm pretty sure the point where a boy needs his dad the absolute most. We'd moved from small town northern Alberta to a suburb of Edmonton (for my mom's government job). He'd gotten a few jobs but none that he was happy with or that paid as well for doing as little as his old one in the north. He and my mom fought and then, he left, to get "work" up in the NWT. He'd already met someone here from up there. He took the car, the credit cards and pretty much all the money we had as a family. Our family would struggle for the rest of my childhood financially, whereas we were squarely middle class well off before (I know, boo hoo). I didn't really see him for the next 4 years. One weekend a year, maybe, for Christmas or something, where he would show back up and act like he was still the big patriarch of the family. My mom let him come back for our sakes mostly, but it was plain as day that him being around made her miserable.
By 14 I'd become the bad influence that other parents didn't want their kids around or they would try to help me by inviting me over for family dinners and take pity on the poor kid from that "broken" family. I went from being a lifelong honours student to one who did the bare minimum to pass a class. I don't know how my mom held it together at all. She was supporting three gigantic, monster eating machines in the form of my two brothers (who were 8 and 10 now) and I, while working 60 hour weeks and still trying to be there as much as possible. She also did everything she could to make sure we didn't particularly "want" for anything that wasn't too out there. She knew that once summer hit, that she wouldn't be able to do anything about the shit I would probably end up in. So, my brothers would stay on my grandparents farm and I would stay with my dad up in bumfuck NWT where I couldn't cause as much trouble (she would be wrong about this).
I was livid that I would have to spend my summer with dad and the woman that broke up our family where I didn't know anybody. The woman (whom I have nothing but complete contempt for to this day) was an awful, manipulative, masochistic, dreadful bitch as I would come to learn over my two months. She got me my first job up there working at the grocery store that was run by a friend of hers (who she was probably fucking, 10 years into that relationship, my father found out she had slept with most of the men in town) to keep me out of trouble. She would do shit like make me make their bed (while leaving out their lube and used condom wrappers in their bedroom) or we would go out for dinner and get back late (where I would have to be at work at 6 am) and tell me that I needed to roll paper logs for the fireplace before I went to bed and then lie to my father that she'd asked me earlier but I just ignored her (fuck, this still makes my blood boil that she would lie to his face in front of me and he would take her side). It got weirder too but I'm not going to post any of that. Needless to say I only truly hate one person alive right now.
My dad worked out of town a lot and she traveled for her job a lot so, basically, at 14 I was left to my own devices for up to a week at a time. I was a one man crime spree in this town. I stole an incredible amount of stuff, from my dad, from her, from the local electronics store, from my job, from the convenience store down the block, stuff I didn't want or need. Hell, I stole my Playstation from a rack in that electronics store. A WHOLE GOD DAMN PLAYSTATION. I never got caught. I didn't really make any friends there. Everyone I worked with was older than me and I was too shy (I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder) to go the youth center like my dad kept egging me on to do. I would just come home and play Command and Conquer on my fresh new Playstation (that I bought with my work money dad, I swear) and go to bed. At work I would go on to dislocate my shoulder, this doesn't matter now, but it will.
Well, by the middle of August I was kind of a mess. I was sullen and miserable at the shit I was going through with my dad's girlfriend, I was eating nothing but junk I would buy going to and coming home from work. One day she decided I needed to mow the lawn (which I had mowed 4 days earlier). I was pissed off and I told her that I wasn't going to, it hadn't even begun to grow back. She told my dad that she asked me politely to mow the lawn and that I told her to fuck off. So my dad yelled at me and sent me out to go mow the lawn. I'm enraged, trying to start the piece of shit lawn mower they had, reefing as hard as I could on the pullstring. My dad comes out and yells what's wrong with me and why do I have to keep making things so miserable here. How because of me, she had to begin going to counselling. I told him to fuck off (first time I'd ever sworn at my parents, I know, ooooooooooh) and he shoves me as hard as he could and I go tumbling head over heels right over my barely healed shoulder. I screamed in pain and jumped up and got as close as I ever would of fighting my dad. He said it couldn't possibly hurt that much and I reminded him of the injury I got at work and that I don't always lie to him about everything that's going on.
He would end up driving me home early a day or two later. These two months caused me and him not to speak again until I was 20 years old. I'm not gonna lie to you Halforums, 11 years ago, I was a mess. I weighed about 330 pounds, I was deeply rooted in depression and barely functional. I had moved out of my mom's house at this point and had to move back in because I couldn't support myself. By this time, my dad had been dumped by her and had become kind of a born again. This was when he tried to reconnect (not successfully) with me. My mom was at wits end what to do for me. Though, over the course of the next few years we did begin to mend fences. I still harbour a lot of resentment towards my dad and yet to this day, when I'm playing a video game or I'm reading some garbage sci-fi novel (he's the one that got me into all this nerdy shit in the first place when I was young. Watching OG Star Trek was how me and him initially really bonded when I was a boy) I still narrate in my head how cool dad would think this is.
After all that trash between us, all I can think about right now is that my dad is dying and I'm never gonna be able to share anymore nerdy shit with him again.
Holy shit, I have no idea how coherent this is. It's TLDR even for me to go back over it.