How can you know?

When is the right time to get married? I really don’t know. I guess it’s when you are truly are in love with someone. I bet that would be hard to know for sure. How can you know that you’re with the right person? How can you know if the person you are meant to be with is sitting right next to you, or somewhere else? You may think that you are with the right person, but you never know. My mother and father thought that they were meant to be together. Well at least she did.

My mother and father got married while they were in college. They had dated throughout college and they thought they were in love. I think my mother was scared. She had been with him for so long that she thought that there would be nobody else. She didn’t know that there was anybody else. She was still in college, not out in the real world. I think that my dad had the same problem.

They had me about a year after they got married. So they didn’t really have much time to just be with each other before they started a family. I think that my mother has been so distracted by that that she didn’t notice my fathers dwindling attention. He spent long hours in his workshop in the basement. Whenever we mom wasn’t home and we usually had to care for ourselves because dad was always in the basement. I would have to watch my siblings and cook (usually mac and cheese). Whenever we needed him we would usually have to yell down the stairs and he would usually just yell back up instead of coming up to see us. Even when mom was home he was normally down there. She was left to care for us by herself a lot of the time. He didn’t really provide much care as we were growing up.

My dad had always been so distant from my mother, he didn’t really give her much attention. He would usually forget about every romantic holiday, including their anniversary. Those were not terribly uncommon things for him to forget if you compare him to a lot of males in our society. I didn’t really pay too much attention to it. They also slept on separate sides of the bed. Not just he has his side and she has the other. It was like my dad didn’t even want to be close to her. He would always have these giant headphones on and he drowned out all noise when he was sleeping. I never paid that much attention to that because I just assumed that was how all parents were.

I don’t remember the exact time that my parents started fighting. I just have this one incident that sticks out in my mind the most. We had gone to Tennessee to go to Dollywood. We made it into a camping trip (we used to camp a lot). We were staying at the crazy horse camp ground. We spent a couple days just hanging out there before we went to the park. All us kids were really excited. My mother and father seemed as if they were as well. Once we got there I remember being rather disappointed. All I wanted to do was ride the rides. They were spaced so far apart that it made them really annoying to get to. Everybody was getting stressed out because we were having trouble navigating through the park. It was also raining so a lot of the rides were shut down. They started fighting. I can’t remember the exact reason, but I think it was something about money. Since it was raining we had to leave the park early. My parents fought all the way back to the campground. I was really scared. My parents had never fought like that before.

It was that same summer that they finally split. My mom and dad got into a fight. It was worse than normal. They were in their room for a while by themselves. My sister went in there and asked what was going on. She came out screaming, “How could you do this to me?!” I was very confused I didn’t know what was going on. My mom came out and said he was leaving. I went into my parents room and my dad was packing his suitcase. I asked him why. Apparently he hasn’t been in love with my mother for a long time. He didn’t want to hurt us but he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. It was the only time I have ever seen my dad cry. He was gone.

My mother didn’t really have any friends at that point, so she decided to lay all her troubles about dad on me. She would tell me all of the things that were going wrong. The things dad would say. I started to really think about the way my dad treated us over the years. How he didn’t really spend that much time with us, he was always hiding, how he left my mom pretty much to care for us by herself. After a while I started to hate my father. What really hit it home was when my mother told me that when she was in her room talking to dad right before he left, he said that he wasn’t ready to be a parent. I was fourteen years old. He had been my dad for fourteen years and he just decided he wasn’t ready. I don’t even know if that is true or not. At the time I was much more ready to believe my mother than my father. I hate him. I hate him for leaving. I hate him for abandoning us. I hate him for never paying child support. I hate him for wanting me to love him, because it hurts that much more that I can’t. I hate the fact that my parents lied to me all my life by telling me that they would be together forever.

I don’t like to spend time with my dad. I try my hardest to stay away from his house. I hate his girlfriend. My dad is sad that I don’t spend time with him. I just can’t forgive him for what he did. It hurt me. I am unable to cry now. I doubt everybody. I think every relationship is going to end in pain. I doubt myself, the choices I make about people. My siblings don’t understand why I hate him so much. I can never tell them why. It would cause too much pain. I know I have to be strong for my siblings.