[juju]

My parents divorced when I was about 5 or 6, and every other weekend I had to go and visit my dad.

My dad's first love is hang gliding, and he drove to the mountains every weekend with his friends so he could fly. I was also taken along.

Eventually, he moved to the mountain. Buffalo mountain, specifically, in Talahina, Oklahoma. He had no electricity, no running water, nothing. Just a fucking cabin on the top of a mountain with no tv, phone, or toilet. This was great fun for him, because he didn't have to drive up the mountain to get to the launch site. He just walked over to his front yard. What can I say? The man loves not having any electricty.

Even though he loves to fly, though, I personally found the mountain to be the most boring place in the entire world. Why he would ever think i'd enjoy being there is beyond me. I don't really think that he took my feelings into consideration at all. When I was with him, he always did what he wanted to do. I was always just drug along for the ride. I've heard that some divorced dads take their kids to the zoo, or the museum, or something. My dad never did this things with me. I hated going to see him, because it was boring.

When I got my learner's permit, he taught me how to drive in his Jeep. I was very excited about this, and it was cool to be able to be taught by my dad. Eventually, he deemed me good enough to do it on my own. I had no license, of course, but who the fuck is going to arrest you on a mountain? He started to let me drive down the mountain so I could pick him up at the landing site after he landed.

Well, one day I was going down the mountain to pick him up, and I reached around into the back seat so I could find my hairbrush. I didn't really have any experience driving, so I didn't know that if you just turn around and start looking for something in the back seat, you'll run headfirst into a fucking tree. Well, that's exactly what I did.

I felt pretty terrible and panicked. I didn't know what to do. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere, with no vehicle. So I walked down the mountain. It was hot, and was a very, very long walk (It's a fucking mountain).

Eventually I met up with him at the bottom, and he wanted to go check out the Jeep to see how it was. That very, very long, exhausting walk down a huge mountain was then duplicated, only this time he insulted me and called me stupid in an infinite variety of creative ways the entire exhausting way back up. He had always called me stupid. One of his main philosophies is that anyone under the age of 18 is a complete idiot. This time it was non-stop for a very long time, though, and it really, really damaged me. Before when he called me stupid, I hadn't really done anything. But this time I was extremely traumatised. What is it about people that makes them want to kick people when they're down? Right at the moment when I most needed someone to tell me that everything was going to be all right, all he cared about was his Jeep. Not me, a human being. Who cares how I feel, right? I screwed up, so the way to solve it is to yell at me and insult me. That way I'll be sure not to do it again. Not doing it again, of course, is momunentally more important than how I feel. He obviously didn't give a damn how I felt, because he made it a personal objective to crush my will and ego. His neverending insults that day made me feel smaller and more insignificant than I'd ever felt in my life.

After that, I never went to stay with him again.

I do have lots of good memories with him, of course. He taught me how to play chess, for one, and we played often. I really loved that and it was something we shared. Don't think I hate my father, this is just one event in my life. Other things happened after this, and this isn't the single defining moment of our relationship.

But this event taught me that no matter how much your parents say they love you, when you really need them to comfort you -- they're really just going to bail on you.

Sadly, my mom did the exact same thing (without the insults), when I later wrecked my own car. When I called her to tell her what had happened (I was extremely traumatized), her only response was "So?". I was like, "So?? Well, can you come and get me?". She then related that she had expected this to happen, and only grudgingly came and picked me up. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking. Like, because I wrecked my car, I deserved to be punished, ostracised, and humiliated. That event, too, was extremely traumatizing, and I needed someone to tell me that everything was going to be okay. All I actually received was a general feeling that I was the most despicable person in the entire world. She always professed to love me, but as a child, I ignored what she said and listened to what she did. In my mind, that event that day proved to me that my mom didn't love me. I grew even more distant from her and began to hate her.



One thing: hindsight is 20/20, and it's probably easy to heap criticism on what I did then or the reactions that I had. But that's how I reacted at that time, and so it's real to me. Real in that I can't change how I reacted, and how I did react affected who I was for years to come.