Yes, this again. Back to talking about my father.

I hate him.

I hate him for his short temper and abusive ways. I hate him because he could not learn to control his temper and therefore did so, so much damage to the whole family. I hate him because he refuses to even admit he has a problem except under extreme circumstances, and even then, only in a vague, meaningless way.

“Oh, I guess I was too hard on you kids sometimes. ”

Um, no. That’s not it at all. You weren’t a harsh parent, you were an abusive parent. If you had been interested and involved in our lives enough to give us a hard time over slacking off or not applying ourselves, that would have been a lot better.

Or at least different.

No, you abused us. You abuse anyone who gets close to you. Hence you ending up all alone and working some crap McJob after working all your life for the government.

Does that strike you as a success story? Is that how you pictured your golden years? All alone, far away from your family, living paycheck to paycheck?

Which reminds me of another reason I hate my father, and this one is far more discrete and specific. I hate you for convincing Mom to do this crazy-ass early retirement shit, even though it meant taking both me and Dave out of university with some vague thought that student loans would take up the slack.

Where was your pull yourself up by your bootstraps ethic then?

Then you take the severance pay t from the government and blow it on a patently ridiculous home based business helping people with their resumes.

People who need help with their resumes don’t have money, Dad. Because they are unemployed. It astounds me that I could not see that at the time. I guess I was still part of the social illusion of my home back then.

You know, the illusion where you are practical and sensible and good with money and thus deserving of your position as administrative head of household.

Well you sure blew that out of the water when you started a resume polishing business in a small town on PEI with a high unemployment rate and where anyone with any brains and/or education leaves as soon as they can.

Great business plan. Totally worth the squandering of your legacy.

But hey, you got what you wanted. You got your little office where you could sit and feel important and pretend you are contributing. You got to buy gadgets, like a computer, a printer/fax/copier, an electric pencil sharpener, and other office bric-a-brac. You got to boss me around and have me dependent on your approval.

You even got the best space heater in the house.

So you blew a bunch of future income when you took early retirement (see Dad, that’s why the government offers it. – it means they save money by paying you less) then blew a bunch of the rest of it on a home based business that never stood a chance of being even remotely profitable. That’s two strikes right there.

The final stroke was that you drove Mom away, resulting in a divorce in which you sold the family home to strangers in order to make splitting assets easier.

Remember that home, Dad? Good ol 135 Belmont Street, home of the Battling Bertrands? The front room where we had our Christmases, the kitchen where all our meals were cooked and then consumed on the kitchen table you built with your own hands? How about the back yard, where once a garden grew? Our cherry tree, our rhubarb patch, our summer savory and our chives? The front yard where your roses and lilacs grew, and where your four children played together? The bedrooms where your children spent so many years growing up?. Does this ring a bell yet?

All of that is gone, gone, gone. Because of you. Because of you, a stranger looks out the east facing window where I used to look up at the stars. Someone else’s things are sitting where my crib was, and where I would lay my head for many years after? Strangers are walking the hallway where your picture of the Queen hung. Strangers go up and down the stairway I used to bounce down on my butt when I was a toddler and where I would clip my head when I hadn’t quite adjusted to being six foot tall yet. Strangers are using the basement where we did all our laundry and where I used to watch Voltron on the black and white TV while Mom watched her soaps upstairs. Strangers use the back steps  where we used to wait for the cats to decide whether or not they really wanted to go outside. Strangers use the second basement where you had your workshop. There is not one place in that home that is still how it was when I was young.

Because that’s the thing about selling the house, Dad. When you did that, you sold three decades of memories, and the only place which ever felt like home to me.

Now new people are making new memories there. And God bless them. We weren’t the first owners of that house, and they won’t be the last. Things change. Life goes on.

But that’s the house where you promised me many times that there would always be a home for me.

Guess you fucked that up too, huh? Another promise broken to go with the promise that you would pay for a college degree for me just like you did for Anne and Catherine.

I hate you, Larry Donald Bertrand, because you actively failed me on every level. You weren’t a competent father figure. You weren’t a competent provider – all the debt that was revealed in the divorce proves that. Ditto for your skills as head of household, naturally.

I hate you because I can directly trace at least sixty percent of what’s fucked up in my life to you and your inability to act like a grownup.

So yeah. I hate your stinking guts, Larry Donald Bertrand.

But God help me, I love you too.

I will talk to you nice people (and not my Dad) tomorrow.