The Jabberwock

I don’t have any good memories of my father. My mom can pull out all the pictures she wants, but nothing is going to change the fact that I don’t remember some random event like my dad building a lego set for me when I was like 4 years old. When I was around 10 or 11, we were fairly cool with each other; mainly because my friends from my elementary school really liked him since he was the only adult on our bus ride home. One of their names was Francis, and sadly his biological father passed away from a heart attack. “Is he your dad? You know, not like, your grandfather or uncle or somethin’?” Francis asked me one day. “Um, yeah, that’s my real dad. What made you ask that?” I stared at him with my head slightly tilted. “Oh, nothing. I was just wondering…. you’re pretty lucky, your dad is sick,” he said quietly. I nodded, but not without hesitation. I wished to tell him that he wasn’t actually the good guy you see in the school yard or on the bus. I yearned to tell him that I wish my dad would stay out of my life, but I had no place wishing that I didn’t have a father to the poor kid who cherished his. My father was the complete opposite of a role model; he was someone I didn’t want to grow up to be. Even as a kid, we were never really close. We didn’t share interests like him and my sister did. I tried to tune in to hockey games, but I wasn’t interested– at least, not until I was older. The only thing he could get out of me was watching Godzilla (1998) and some Animal Planet documentaries, until one day I walked in during a section about tarantulas and I cried for an hour straight. After that, there was no solid foundation holding our relationship together. It’s like trying to make 100 evil elephants walk across a bridge made of nothing but sticks. There is a bridge, yes, but it’s weak, and the evil is making it collapse. Whenever my family got large sums of money, be it paychecks or taxes, he’d spend hundreds of dollars on drinks. When he was drunk, he acted like a five year old and would roughhouse me and my sister like he was. Unfortunately for him, I was a mature 12 year old (who was very nervous and stressed out about being at BLA,) so my family fought a lot, verbally and physically. I’m pretty sure that this period of fighting caused him to seek out another woman, which I really couldn’t care less about, but geez… have some decorum. Either way, those kids at my old school don’t know that he was a piece of crap, which is fine by me. It was very fascinating seeing him act in a way he didn’t have the heart to at home.