For some ungodly reason, I woke up at 6am thinking of ghosts of the pasts. Now it’s almost 7 and I’m unable to go back to sleep, but that’s okay because I’ve got all day to do that – pending the kids let me.

I don’t know why, but I woke up thinking about my dad. My “dad” is not to be confused with Phil. My “dad” is Ken, the man my mother married when I was 5 and the father of my only brother. During the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about both of them fairly heavily and I keep wondering why that is. I haven’t spoken to my dad since late 2003 and my brother since late 2005. In recent years, my mother’s been reluctant to tell me anything about my brother, so I’ve all but written him off.

For those new to Sunnyland, I’m an only child. I have 3 siblings, but I’m an only child for all intents and purposes. My mom and Ken separated when I was 11 and my brother was 5 and my brother went to live with my dad while I stayed with my mom and thus, we were raised in completely different ways in completely different households with very little overlap until I moved in with my dad briefly when I was 15. And of course my sisters are 26 and 30 years younger than me.

My dad was/is a very bitter man who can hold grudges and hatred in his heart indefinitely. It’s a long story that I’m not going to retell today, but long story short, at the end of my parents’ marriage my mother had an affair and even though their marriage was over long before that happened, my dad remained bitter about that fact until the day I stopped speaking to him and throughout my brother’s entire life, my dad poisoned him against my mother in order to punish her for doing that to him. Or at least that’s what I think his motivation was. Now my brother’s just as fucked up, hateful and bitter as my dad is, especially towards my mother.

When my brother came to stay with me for what was supposed to be a couple of weeks over Xmas in 2005, we talked a lot about the past and I tried to set the record straight about his childhood, but he wouldn’t hear any of it. For example, my mom used to routinely send him letters and packages in the mail when she couldn’t actually go see him and my dad would throw them out. I witnessed this with my own eyes but my brother doesn’t believe me. He thinks my dad is this perfect man who can do no wrong because he raised my brother all on his own, with no help from my mother, or at least that’s his perception. What my brother to this day doesn’t realize is that his entire life, even to this day, his father’s used him as a tool, a weapon, against my mother and nothing more. Oh I have no doubt that Ken loves my brother, as much as he’s capable of love, but as I said before, he’s fed the kid venom since he was a toddler and now my brother’s this fucked up 24-year-old kid with no direction and no life outside of his father, from what I understand.

I stopped speaking to my dad when he didn’t get Wes anything for his first Xmas. When I was giving birth to Wes, my dad called my hospital room moments after Wes was born, I was literally still delivering the placenta, so my mother answered the phone and filled him in on what was going on and for some reason, my dad got mad at ME because I forced him to speak to my mother and didn’t speak to him myself. He held this grudge for almost an entire year, refusing to pick up or hold Wes, which I thought was weird, but I never really thought it was a malicious act until that Xmas when everyone got presents but my son. And then after the presents were opened and my dad started making Xmas dinner, we were all in the kitchen shooting the shit and Wes was on the floor crawling around and pulling himself up on my dad’s leg, my dad completely ignored him and at one point even sort of slid Wes across the floor and away from him with his foot. I played nice for the rest of the day but inside I was seething and that was the last time I saw or spoke to  my dad.

I have a theory on why my dad behaved this way toward my son and I think it goes deeper than just being pissed off that my mother answered the phone while I was in the middle of giving birth. You see, when I found out I was pregnant with Wes, this woman my dad got involved with – against my advice – was about to give birth to my dad’s 2nd son whose name I don’t even know.

Her name was Janet and she was only a  few years older than me, known to be one of the town’s biggest sluts and I’m not the kind of person who uses that term as a negative in many instances, but in Janet’s case, it fit. She would go to the local bars, pick guys up, go back to their places, sleep with them and then steal the money from their wallets before taking off like a thief in the night. And this isn’t just rumour, I know this to be fact because Janet used to be my Aunt Heather’s best friend, my Aunt Heather being my dad’s sister, and Janet lived with her for a while at the same time I was living there as well, and Janet used to brag about stealing these men’s money. It was like a second income for her. When she’d find a “rich” one, she’d become his girlfriend long enough for him to buy her things and pay some of her bills, but when the honeymoon period ended, so would teh relationship and she’d move onto the next guy.

Until one day she found herself a man who she thought would take care of her forever. I don’t remember his name, but he had a good job and drove a nice truck and Janet decided she was going to get her hooks into him so she got pregnant. And again, this isn’t just rumour, this is fact. She got pregnant on purpose to trap this man, I was there when she was telling my Aunt Heather all about it. But Janet got a little more than she bargained for in this man, what she didn’t know was that he had a very expensive coke habit and when her daughter was born, he wasn’t even there for it because he was coked out of his mind on their couch. Long story short, the relationship didn’t work out, so Janet went on welfare and laid low with her daughter while she got her shit together and her figure back.

Enter my dad.

My dad has worked at Toshiba, in the warehouse, for eleventy billion years and as a result he gets a lot of vacation days and makes a fair amount of money. And he’d always had a crush on Janet.

I was there, at the coffee shop, the night it all began between my dad & Janet. The flirting was enough to make a person puke. My Aunt Heather was there too and was equally disgusted by the two of them because she knew how Janet was and she didn’t want Janet to get her hooks into my dad. When they started dating, my Aunt Heather and I stopped speaking to either of them for a few months but they didn’t care, they said “fuck you, we’ll do what we want” and even though both of us warned my dad that she’d try & get pregnant to trap him, he didn’t listen. But lo & behold, that’s exactly what happened and when we found out Janet was pregnant, we both rushed to my dad’s side to support him. The relationship was all but over by the time she conceived so the paternity of the child has always been somewhat in question by everyone but my dad, but he never went for the paternity test and ever since the baby was born, he’s been paying $350/month in child support for a child he’s only even seen once. (Things in that regard could be different now, but knowing my dad, I kinda doubt it.)

I think that baby Wes reminded my dad too much of the child he conceived with Janet and he took his anger and frustration out on us for lack of anywhere else to channel it.

During that time, he became even more bitter toward women and painted them all as evil whores, not even making an exception for me, his daughter. All the time, if we disagreed on something, he’d tell me I was just like my mother and he said it with such disgust it was like I was covered in shit simply for having a vagina. To this day, I’ve never met a bigger misogynist and I hang out on one of the most misogynistic forums on the whole internet. Those boys have nothing on Ken and the attitudes I grew up with.

Another reason our relationship began to cool is that one day my dad got a little drunk and called me up to confess things to me that a daughter should probably never know about her dad. Let me preface this part of the story by telling you that my dad and I have always been very open about sex. When I lost my virginity (on his couch), he was the first person I told. When I realized that I couldn’t have an orgasm from sex, he and I discussed the million ways and positions to make it happen. (It never did.)

Well, this one night he called me up and the first thing he told me was that he’d been drinking and then the conversation became this fucked up confessional that I couldn’t tear myself away from. Among the things he told me was that he had this recurring dream about being sexually dominated by another man and sucking his dick and that he wanted to make this dream a reality. I suggested he go to a gay bar and find a guy to hook up with, I even volunteered to go with him to do this, but before we finished that part of the conversation, he was telling me that if he laid on his back in just the right way, with his legs and feet up against the wall, he could suck his own dick and that he liked the taste of his own semen. As I was digesting this little fun fact, he started telling me about how sometimes he would go to the produce section of the grocery store and buy mini cucumbers which he’d take him and put in his ass while he jerked off. I told him toys were safer and he said cucumbers were cheaper and he could throw away the evidence afterward so my brother would never find anything while snooping. After telling me all of this, he told me that if I ever told anyone any of this, he’d deny it all and I’d look stupid, so for the longest time I never told anyone but Blake.

But when my brother was here in 2005 and telling me how he hoped to grow up to be half the man his dad was, I told him about the whole conversation. He of course, called me a liar at first, but then I pointed out that Ken has never been happy with women, any women, and has been perpetually single for most of his life. Isn’t that a little weird for a heterosexual man? And then my brother said that Ken hates gays and I said that’s even more proof that he’s closeted, so many closeted men claim to hate gays and say all kinds of derogatory things towards them to overcompensate for their own feelings. My brother admitted that my theory held a bit of weight but then he said he’d love his dad if he was gay or straight anyway so the conversation didn’t matter, which I agreed with and that was the end of it…until we woke up the next day and my brother blasted me for trying to tarnish his dad’s “good name” by making up lies about him. (As if I could even make up something like that!)

That’s when my brother forbid me from calling Ken my dad anymore. He said, “he’s my dad, not yours, quit saying he is” and that hurt. In all the years my dad and I had fought each other my whole life, the one thing that was never ever said by either of us was “you’re not my dad!” or “you’re not even my daughter!” That was a line we just never crossed and my brother that day crossed it.

Then he started getting racist and violent, punching my walls and calling me a “nigger”, so I grabbed the phone and threatened to call the cops if he didn’t pack his shit up and get the fuck out of my house. At the time I had two handsets for our phone, so I handed him one and said he’d better arrange for a ride because his shit was going to be out in the snow in the next few minutes, so he called a friend, packed his shit up and as he was leaving he apologized for getting violent and scaring my kids and said he’d be back one day. He promised he’d be back. That was the last time I saw him.

I used to ask my mom if she’d heard from my brother and what he was up to and she used to tell me (he was usually unemployed, had a trashy girlfriend, living with Ken and trying to get money out of my mom) but more and more the updates have become less and less, like she’s reluctant to tell me what he’s doing, like it’s none of my business. So I don’t ask anymore.

I’m an only child. *shrug*

Now why the hell this was all in my head at 6 o’clock in the fucking morning is beyond me but I’m glad it’s now been purged and I don’t have to think about them for another year. Maybe since things tend to go down with my family around Xmas, I tend to think about this stuff around this time of year, I dunno.

I worry constantly about the deathbed confessional. Ken is not a healthy man and he’s halfway through his 50s, his own dad died of cancer in his mid-60s. I worry about my brother having to take care of him and watch him die all alone. I worry that I’m going to get a call one day, and I know I will, that Ken is dying and that he may want to see me. I play the scenario in my head all the time as to what I’m gong to do when that time comes. If Ken wants to see me and I don’t go, my brother will never forgive me…but do I care? If Ken doesn’t want to see me, should I go to the funeral? I figure I probably shouldn’t. When the time comes, will I be upset? Will I have regrets? Will he? I think about these things all the time. In fact, I think similar things about my grandmother and aunts & uncles that I no longer speak to all the time too, but this post isn’t about them.

Really what I wonder about the most is…when does life stop being something you have to survive and become something else? For me life has always been about survival and now that it’s not, I feel a little bit lost. Maybe that’s why my brain wanders into the painful past so often, it’s what I know and there’s comfort in that. This life I live now where most of my needs are taken care of, I have all the time in the world to do practically anything I want and everything’s going to be okay? I don’t so much know how to live that life.

But I’m working on figuring it out. One day I’ll find my niche.

And I think this post is done.