The man responsible for my birth.

My father was not the greatest man in the world to me growing up partially because he back-to-back like my mother was a baby making machine then they stopped.

I know I was an oops almost 10 years later, the product of a mother with physical and mental health issues. There was the survival of the fittest, with me absorbing the personality of the other causing a miscarriage … I went over it all before in “Mother’s Day Gift” which I encourage you to read.

I wasn’t truly accepted by the family my father included. He wasn’t a bad father, but he was always just sort of there the man who brought home the small amount of money he could make. Because of a few handicaps (he was somewhat small framed left-handed blind in his left eye, had a 6th grade education) he could never get any high paying jobs which made him a workaholic.

Growing up I never understood any of that. Like I said he wasn’t a bad man just wasn’t there. When he wasn’t working he simply liked to be alone so he never really paid attention to me.

With that and the fact that I was the caretaker for my mother, I never really got to know him despite the fact that I spent the better part of 40 years with him I never got to know him and yet I am like him.

Granted I don’t have all of the infirmities he had, I at least completed high school have vision in both of my eyes and stand over a foot over him and am ambidextrous. But I know what it’s like to be in low paying jobs and having to hustle, and I also know why he sometimes needed to be alone just so that he could process all of the bullshit that life was throwing at him.

We even share the liking of some of the same TV shows, too many of the shows he used to watch I have in my DVD collection. (MASH, All in the Family, The Three Stooges…)

In many ways he was merely the man who was responsible for my birth. In many ways I never had a father, and for that reason (to the best of my knowledge) never became a father. Having no father (just living with the man responsible for my birth) I don’t even know if I would know how to be a father especially considering the fact that I am now 53.

I’m not saying that I may not been responsible for the birth of one or two kids I may be totally unaware of but if these children were to be presented to me, I have no idea how I would respond.

I didn’t hate my dad, I had a lot of respect for him but I had no love for him either. The closest thing to a father figure I never even had. Which made it hard growing up, never having someone to explain certain things to you things I had to figure out for myself, even to the point that at 53 years old I am still trying to figure things out that I should have figured out at 18 because of the fact that I basically raised myself.

What makes it even harder is that my father died 10 years ago and he was born on the same birth week as me only so many years before. What is even sadder if I were to have a son or a daughter at this late age, how would I even react to them would I accept them and raise them as my own or would I be like my father and simply be the man responsible for their birth.