When people tell you to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, it leaves you gasping and asking how a father could become so disconnected from reality that he mistakes loyalty for love and denial for protection.

I want to say, “who are the people sitting with you at the dinner table?” but there was no dinner table. i tried, didn’t i? still paying for it.

I realized at a very young age that adults could choose not to see. not to ignore. but rather act out of rage because someone mentally ill relates to the venomous anger and disdain you live with today.

Or worse, you could see everything and decide that acknowledging the truth was simply too expensive for their convenience.

People need people, especially family. But when love depends on protecting a lie, it stops being love. when do families stop being families?

It becomes a prison where everyone serves the sentence except the people holding the keys.

Even when it’s wrong, having someone willing to lie for you is a dangerous kind of devotion. It doesn’t preserve a family.

It buries one.

If you can still call it a family.

you, sir, were not blind. you knew.

you knew my mother’s illness was swallowing her whole. you knew of the other addictions, and you partook, engaged.

you knew everyone walked on eggshells. you knew our home revolved around delusions that suited your drunken reality.

And still…

you chose the bottle.

you chose denial.

you chose anger.

you chose the comfort of pretending over the discomfort of protecting.

Every excuse you made became another brick in the wall that separated the truth further.

you defended behavior that should have terrified you.

you are not, nor have you ever been a father. you were survival. income.

to all. and that godless lack of love in your life is clear to me.

you magnified imagined offenses because they conveniently justified your resentment toward the rest of the world and your family.

terrorizing everyone, driving drunk off his cheap beers in a run down car with rotting teeth.

this is my biological father.

there is no shame in that. but i feel sorry that you lacked figures to teach you to understand the foundation between good and evil.

they are spoken in the Gospels of Matthew, mark, luke and john.

and change? it is challenging, but there is hope in acts.

you enabled illness while calling it loyalty.

you enabled the illness because you can’t even be bothered to pick out your own clothes or do anything alone. a codependent monster in a dangerous environment.

I often wonder if you ever asked yourself the question you never asked anyone else:

Did I help her?

Or was it easier to keep her sick than risk losing the only person who never left you?

correction: she did leave you. and divorced you.

That’s the cruel thing about enabling.

It disguises itself as love while quietly feeding the very thing that’s destroying everyone.

Manipulative. Calculating. Angry. Drunk. hateful.

The alcohol wasn’t the disease. It was the permission slip.

It gave you somewhere to hide while everyone else paid the price.

You weren’t in psychiatrists’ offices.

You weren’t asking doctors how schizophrenia steals a person piece by piece.

You weren’t carrying the weight of treatment.

But you were always hiding in the backyard, drinking a 24-pack a day, it was?

the same backyard i played with baby lizards.

The same baby lizards you took off my hands and stripped their skin off as i sobbed running away in a cloud of your smell of alcohol.

i remember. all of it.

Always there with another opinion that managed to wreck more havoc than the next.

Always there with another excuse.

Beer bottles multiplied in the backyard faster than accountability ever grew inside that house.

You hid while relationships collapsed one by one.

Not from schizophrenia alone.

But from the refusal to acknowledge it.

The tragedy wasn’t that my mother was sick.

The tragedy was that the one person who could have anchored the family to reality untied the rope himself.

Children don’t need perfect parents. They need honest ones.

you are the biggest failure of a man and father i have ever seen. and that says quite a bit coming from me.

To question our own eyes.

To mistake silence for peace.

The beautiful irony is that I wasn’t truly raised by you.

I thank god for THAT love every day because so much good has come from it.

She belonged to a generation that believed truth was an act of love, not an act of betrayal.

her tongue spoke harshly, but it was honest. and came from love.

She taught me something you never could:

Reality doesn’t become a lie because enough people refuse to acknowledge it.

I knew who you were long before I was old enough to understand.

Children always know.

They may not have the vocabulary.

But they always recognize the difference between safety and fear.

Between love and control.

Between protection and abandonment.

So no, I won’t call you a father simply because biology says I should.

That title belongs to the men who protect, who sacrifice, who tell the truth when the truth costs them something. those who stand firm with grace.

Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s inheritance.

And I choose not to pass it on.

i couldn’t carry the weight of the disgust, anger and disappointment i had for you so I gave it to my Holy father who met me in my biggest mess and gave me grace, mercy, understanding and love.

that is the beauty of our lord. you don’t need to build a high staircase to get to him. he met me right where i was: on my knees from being knocked down by a life i didn’t know how to discern.

i stopped trying to get up.

who says i need to?

i am proud to live life on my knees praying for the salvation of humanity. my sins and the sins of those i love and cherish.

I spent years unlearning lessons I never should have been taught.

You weren’t responsible for every hardship in my life.

But you were responsible for the home you helped create.

i do not enable addiction, i do not enable hypocrisy and i do not enable what God has given me the grace to see as grave and mortal sins.

i don’t think of you. except the few occasions i go out and i smell a dirty bar filled with cheap alcohol.

my soberity is your badge of honor.

By the grace of god, i have learned i will never be anything like you. wHAT THAT HAS BLESSED ME WITH IS TO HAVE A LIKEMINDED, KIND HEARTED AND LOVING partner who refuses to be anything like you, too.

cON, YOU REAP WITH YOU SOW IN THIS LIFETIME. AND THE NEXT.