Circles

Some people live their lives in circles. Sometimes kids watch their dads do terrible things, take terrible substances, and drink terrible things. They make vows, ‘I’ll never be that way.’ Or promises. ‘I swear that will never be me.’ Although some see bad things and take them as normal. They continue it because it’s all they know. However, some go back and forth. Life isn’t easy.

If your father passes away at a young age, then perhaps you’re cut off from learning both ends, you end up somewhere in the middle. If your mother ends up remarrying to a man who doesn’t like you, or anyone really, then where does that leave you. When you’re a boy growing up, who teaches you life’s lessons? Your mother?

That’s a great answer if your mother is there. If she’s not working eighty-hour weeks just to help pay the bills, pay for her citizenship. If she’s not coming straight home to cook breakfast, lunch, or dinner, for whatever time of day she finally managed to return.

So, as you grow up you learn from others. Friends, neighbors, classmates.

Sadly not all the humans around you are always good, so the boy becomes a man and he works to help his mom. He pays the bills, he does the cooking and cleaning, and then he meets a girl.

For all it’s worth, she was a spitfire of a girl. Younger, but clearly older than him in so many ways. It doesn’t take long for the man-boy to become a father.

Unfortunately, it’s the things he never learned that come back to haunt him. Like how to take care of little ones, how to communicate with a partner, or how to be a dad, but gods he tried.

When the bad humans weren’t interfering, or the lack of knowledge wasn’t palpable, he was there, reading bedtime stories, knowing the right kind of gifts to give, and always preaching about love.

As a boy, he thought love would win it all, that if there was only love, nothing else needed work. That everything would just work itself out. No one ever showed him that love was work.

He showed it sometimes, though.

To love someone is more than just cool toys and easter egg hunts. It’s also them disciplining you, putting you in time out, and making you lunch for school.

Love was being aware of the hidden alcohol bottles and not knowing what to do. Love was seeing the red eyes. Love was being yelled at in the face for reasons you have no clue of.

His love was so painful.

So the marriage with the girl ends. He finds himself a dad with an empty kid’s room. The child is gone, the girl is no longer in his bed, and he feels a new kind of pain.

If everyone deals with things differently, why did he live the same way?

The dad sees his child, randomly but often enough, and finally, the child decides they’ve had enough.

The love had become twisted, something the dad had never been warned about. All the toys found their way to pawn shops, and the easter egg hunts, the fun weekend trips, all went away. No one ever told the dad how to pick himself back up out of a slump. He made the vows, ‘That will never be me.’ But he was wrong.

Was it his fault or the world?

The child says, “I hate you. I guess you’re not my dad anymore.”

Is the dad still a dad? Is he now just a man? He never learned how to not be a dad, so he still holds on to photographs, napkins from past birthday parties, and even old handmade Father’s Day cards.

He will always be a dad, but no one told him that. No one stopped him as he consumed the terrible substances, and drank the terrible things. No one stopped him from becoming his father.

So then the dad passed away, leaving behind a broken-hearted kid. He left behind memories and the knowledge that he lived his life in a circle.