Part one:

My dad:

When my mom first married my dad I thought he was fantastic. He built castles from washing machine boxes and wrestled. He work a night shift and didn’t come home until after midnight. This is one of the few good memories of my childhood.... My mom didn’t like waiting for him alone so she’d let me stay up with her until he got home. She’d put pizza rolls in the oven and back in the olden days they made egg rolls the same as they do the pizza rolls and those were my favorite. 

We’d wash my hair, heat up our snack, watch some show like Starsky and Hutch and then the Tonight show and then there were just a couple really late shows and we’d watch those. We’d cuddle on the couch under a blanket and when my dad came home he’d get into his coat pocket and hand me a sandwich baggy with four or five candies in it.

If you are at all familiar with Spokane wa, then you know that there is a Rosauers  grocery store in Five Mile. Well, back when we had dinosaurs as pets there was a drugstore there as well and in the parking lot a Penny Candy Store.... 

Yes, it just slapped me that I am fucking old. That entire last sentence sounded like “ And gee, Buffy, maybe we could stop by the soda shop and share a malt too!”

Anyway... Back to my story....

My day always, ALWAYS, made sure to bring me a few penny candies that he’d buy with his tips from driving a taxi.

One school year we were short the money for new school clothes. My grandparents, being the, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, kind of loving Christians they were, told my dad that they’d purchased a new property downtown and it needed cleared of rocks. They ever so graciously paid my dad $1.50 an hour to work in the scorching hot sun to pick up rocks by hand for days. I remember this because my mother helped him and my brother and I sat in our car watching them.

He once had to ask my neighbors if my brother and I could eat dinner with them because he’d quit the taxi job and was hired to drive city bus but there was a couple missed paychecks as the city paid every two weeks. He and my mom ate onions between two slices of bread with ketchup and mustard.

I wasn’t old enough to appreciate how humiliating these last couple of things must have been and my dad has never told me that he wished he hadn’t done them.

He adopted my brother and I when my bio dad wanted to give me away for not calling his new wife mom. 

For years we’d go to what we considered a fancy restaurant at the Spokane International Airport to have dinner to celebrate “Adoption Day”

When he got the bus job.... I knew then that we were....

Rich!

Then....( dark clouds roll in, tumble weeds blow across the deserted street)

I got a brain. You know, like an eleven year old brain that knows everything and huffs and rolls the beings eyes to the backs of their head.

And he got... well, let’s just say, more than he’d bargained for.

My mother was batshit crazy.

My mother began to be sure that he and I had no relationship lest when her evil plans came together I’d have no one to help me.

My brother, good Lord, my brother. A serial killer in the making... lying, fire starting, animal torturing thief of a fucking asshole.

And me. A fuck you, you aren’t my dad, don’t even try it, motherfucker, and lift a hand to me, I dare you, do it, my mom will slit your throat. He’ll no I’m not obeying YOU! ( ya, a wee bit of an anger issue with my actual bio dad throwing me away and literally paying this guy to take us. That was painful and took years to untangle.)

And him.... pushed to the very brink.

Part two coming soon. I’m broken.