My Father Was Labeled A Dead-Beat, But He Suffered From Mental Illness & Addiction
From a very young age, I never really had a relationship with my father. He came around every once in a while, well every other 3–5 years. He always ended up disappearing eventually. He battled with alcoholism and drug addiction so it was always hard to build that relationship. It was a cycle, his pattern that he just couldn’t break. Plus he would always run from his problems (me), and any situations that were high stress (my mother). Not having a relationship with him, definitely hindered my relationships with people on his side of the family, even though they always bought me gifts every holiday and birthday, it’s just not what I wanted though.
I grew up in a one-parent household, it was me, my mother, and my sister. We struggled and experienced poverty from time to time, but most of it was because my mother didn’t know how to manage money and had a hoarding disorder. I remember my mom getting her car repossessed from time to time, and us having to use my grandmother’s food stamp card for groceries. We had a lot of help from my mother’s side of the family as far as my grandmother, grandfather, aunts, and uncles. So, we never really went without. I was fine getting everything from my immediate family on my mother’s side because I knew them and had relationships with them , but my mom and grandmother were still forcing me to have a relationship with my father’s side of the family because they had ‘money’ and bought me gifts whenever there was a holiday or birthday.
Whenever I would go over my dad’s side of the family for the holidays, it would feel very awkward. Mainly because I was there just to get gifts, and then leave as quickly as I could, sounds harsh but it’s just the truth. I wouldn’t talk at all around them, I felt like a mute, I just wasn’t comfortable and always on edge. Honestly, I just didn’t have anything to say to them because I really didn’t know them, and didn’t care to. ”Thanks for the gifts, but I still don’t know you, and where the hell is my dad?” I would always have that thought in my mind. The root of why I’m related to these people was never there, so I would feel like my time spent with them served no purpose. Sounds harsh, but that’s just the honest truth.
I honestly never even asked them for anything for Christmas or birthday’s because I just didn’t want to go over there and talk to them. I didn’t want a relationship with them, and I never desired to have one. It just didn’t feel right or make sense in my eyes. They would always ask me uncomfortable questions like “Why are you so quiet?” “Does anything excite you?” “How are your grades?”. I know they most likely didn’t mean any harm by asking those questions, but it just really pissed me off. It was like they were questioning my being instead of accepting me for who I was. To this day I am still a quiet, reserved person.
The thing that always bothered me the most was there was always a gigantic elephant in the room, and people failing to address it when I was a kid always blew my mind because I was aware of it. They were always giving me these gifts to make up for what my father was lacking, but to be honest they had bigger issues that they needed to address with him, like his addiction problem, which also should’ve been explained to me more as a child. See, black people have this thing where they like to keep secrets until they die. Well, I’m sure it’s not only black people that do it, but black people are prime for doing it. They do it for ’protection’ but it ultimately doesn’t benefit the child or the family in the end. I say this because my father was always painted out to be this bad guy, but the whole time he was battling addiction and people around him treated it as if he could overcome this by himself.
So, yeah, I grew up thinking my dad was a terrible dead-beat until I finally grew up and understood things. This man was never consistent with anything because he was an addict and I later found out that he suffered from bipolar disorder as well. When you’re an addict people resort to calling you “crazy” and a “bum” instead of trying to get you help. Those two words were always what I knew of my father, the words my mother would call him; and then she always had the audacity to say “You act just like your father” or “You look just like your father”. I always found a problem with this because yesterday you just called him a crazy bum, and today you’re saying that I act and look like him. So, are you calling me a crazy bum? As a kid, that’s how I took it. As an adult, I understand that is not what she meant. The good traits of him were never shared with me, so what else was I supposed to think? I did not want to be compared to him then.
As of 2020, my father is in rehab giving it another try for about the 20th time. Here recently, he sold my grandmother’s car for some cocaine. She was able to get her car back thankfully, but this is just a prime example of situations that I do not want to be a part of. So everyday, I still battle with how in the hell can I build a relationship with this man? Or will it just never happen? I have two older brothers who are the same age, 26, and a younger sister who is 15. We are all siblings because we share the same dad. My brother Matt, we kind of had a relationship when we were younger, but it was always weird because of obvious reasons. My brother Shaun, he is currently incarcerated. I didn’t meet him until I was about 13 or 14 years old. We talked online and I finally met him at the fair, he looks exactly like my dad, they could be twins. We didn’t have much time to build a relationship because he was sentenced to 10 years in prison when he was 18 years old. A lost black boy just trying to find his way, and provide for his newborn daughter. He would write to me from time to time, and also text me from jail. I would never write him back, but I would respond to the text messages. Soon after, I just stopped completely. Honestly, I was just scared. I had never dealt with someone being incarcerated and the thought of prisons and the police just scared me to death, so I began to leave the whole situation alone and hoped that we could build something when he gets out. He should be getting out here soon, it’s definitely almost been 10 years, considering the fact that he turned 27 this year.
My little sister, well, she’s just like me. Very quiet, and isn’t going to talk to you or try to build a relationship with you if you don’t initiate it first; and even if you do initiate it, she has to be comfortable around you which is very seldom. I’m aware that since I am 9 years older, it’s my responsibility to try and build a relationship with her, but to this day I still don’t know how. I mean, I remember the days when her mother would call my mothers phone telling her to take my father off of child support “or else”. Not to mention the horrible names she called my mom like a “black beast” or “gorilla”. She was a hispanic lady that thought she had an advantage over black women, she was sadly mistaken because to this day she tries to be nice to my mother and kiss her ass. She also still asks my mom to take my father off of child support, he owes over $150,000.
My mom keeps holding on to this back child support for petty reasons, to prove a point. I’m twenty-four now and I take care of my own self; and quite frankly, I don’t expect an addict who’s currently in rehab to pay child support any time soon, or ever, and that’s fine with me because I don’t need it. This child support has prevented him from having jobs and has landed him in jail a couple of times due to non-payment. It basically ruined his life, and I have my own theory that this led him to abusing drugs and alcohol even more. I never understood how she expected him to pay anything if he couldn’t keep a job and kept having to go to jail due to child support. Again, this built a wall between me and my father because of the negative situations surrounding us.
To this day I still don’t have a relationship with him. The last time I saw him was at my aunt’s funeral last year. He was super quiet as usual, the man just didn’t have much to say I guess. Honestly, on the rare occasions that I see him, he reminds me a lot of myself, minus the addiction. A person who is dealing with bipolar disorder, trying to figure out the world and get people to understand that we can’t do this alone. You can’t handle everyone the same, some people need extra care, even black fathers that deal with mental illness.
