I was only about 2 years old when my parents filed for divorce. At the time, it wasn’t a big deal for me. I didn’t know how majorly it would affect me in the end. Not having a parent in your teen years is like doing a puzzle with a missing piece. You know the piece is missing, but you try to complete it anyway. You know it’s gone, but there’s nothing you can do about it.


Growing up, I knew that every other weekend I was supposed to go over to my dad’s house. And it was fine by me, that’s just the way it was. When I was younger, my dad was married to another woman named Shanda. She had two young kids, Ashley and Maria. My brother and I would both go over there, because he is both our father. We all pretty much grew up together.


In fourth grade, I went through a tragic house fire. All our stuff was lost, and we had to find somewhere else to stay for a while. When I went over to my father’s house, there were investigators there asking questions. I was still pretty young at the time, so I didn’t know what was going on. I just kind of blew it off. I was young, and confused.

Around the time I was in sixth grade, things started getting a little rocky. I was getting older, and I did things with my friends. And having to go over there was cutting into my time. My father didn’t like it when I would skip out on him, so I would just have to suck it up, and go to his house. I didn’t mind going over there, but he was barely around. So I was stuck with Shanda all the time, and her kids. Around that time, I didn’t really want to go over there anymore, so I wrote letters to Friend of the Court, saying I didn’t want to go because my father was never there. This kind of made my dad mad.


Ever since then things just went downhill. When I was near the end of my seventh grade year, my dad divorced Shanda. He started going out with this girl named Stephanie. She had three daughters, all under the age of ten, so you can understand why I might not get along with them. I thought everything would go fine, because she seemed pretty nice. Although I had to babysit over there for them, which I didn’t understand because I was over there to visit my dad, not babysit. But again, I must suck it up. I can’t do anything about it.

During the summers, my brother and I must go to our dad’s house for four weeks. We could either do the four weeks straight, or do two in the beginning, and two at the end. Not really liking the little kids to much, we chose the two week idea. Well it wasn’t exactly summer yet, so we went over to my dad’s house for the weekend and such. My dad thought that we were staying for the two weeks, but my mom said we weren’t. So when my mom showed up at our dads on Sunday, things didn’t turn out good. My mom was yelling, and my dad was yelling, and I didn’t know what to do. My mom was saying to get our stuff and go, but my dad was saying to get back in the house. I was really confused and scared, so I started to cry. My brother sat by my side and tried to calm me down. My mom was going to go into his house and take us out if she had to. But my dad grabbed her pushed her out onto the lawn. Somewhere in this mess the cops ended up being called. When they got there, my mom and dad told their side of the story. I was still in the house at the time, because I didn’t want to get in the way. Eventually, the cops took my mom off to jail for the night, and me and brother had to stay at my dad’s house wondering what happened.

Ever since the divorce my dad has been trying to get custody over my brother and I. And in eighth grade it became really bad. Since the whole cops situation, my dad has been trying to put my mom in jail just to get our custody. We would constantly have to write letters and go to court. Which is a lot for a preteen to handle. Then the lecturing started. Every time my brother and I would go to his house, him and Jenny would take us down into the basement for several hours and tell us not to lie for our mom, and how he is better. We still stayed with our mom, and still went to his house on weekends.

It was a normal Friday, and we were scheduled to go to his house for the weekend. So we went to the Meijer gas station, and waited. He never showed. We figured he probably sent our Grandma to get us, because sometimes he would do that. But she never showed. So we just went home. The weekend after that, we found ourselves still sitting at that gas station, waiting. And he still never came. I didn’t know at the time that I would never see him again. Eventually, after numerous weekends of waiting, we just stopped going. We figured he didn’t want to see us again.

As the months went on, everything seemed normal. Besides the fact, I didn’t have a father. I sometimes would go over to my ex step mothers house just to see the kids I grew up with. Ashley still goes over to my father’s house, because he is her dad to. She would tell me about her time over there. She told me that if someone at my dad’s house would even mention my name, they would get in severe trouble. And that the only reason that my dad stopped seeing us was because Jenny didn’t like us, and that we were just a waste of time. All of these words, coming from my own father. I couldn’t believe it, but I had to face reality. I would grow up without a father.

I’m not saying that my father was a bad person; he just made some wrong decisions. It really did affect me, now sometimes I have panic attacks that I can’t control, or do anything about. I do have abandonment issues, so I don’t like it when people drop out of my life. I normally cannot handle it. I did love my father, very much, and it’s hard not having him here. And since he is gone, so is that part of my family, including aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. I did learn from this experience though. I learned to always love the people around you, because you never know when they will go.