Posted by Anonymous on 2018/10/23 under Life It all began years ago really. I needed a place to vent my feelings of sadness and broken heartedness at the feelings of my father who had managed to turn into a complete or shall I say evolve into a lunatic. He was crazy but I didn't realize how crazy he was until I became an adult and the shadow of childhood no longer surrounded me. I realize how much my deceased mother hid from us and also how much she never shared with us. She wanted us to not hate our father but after her death we saw him for who he really was. All my childhood I was talked about, gossiped about because of his actions which I consequently knew nothing about. It was hard for me to make friends in part because my mom lived in constant fear of other people talking about her and her family. I once asked her to leave daddy and be free from all of his lies and deception. Her response was that she was too old to start a new life. Every school function I ever went too was never attended by them. I rarely ever miss any of my children's activities. I even volunteer and find ways to be a part of their life on a regular basis. I have come to realize every relationship is a journey. Even though the comments my children say may hurt me I am glad because I know they are not afraid to express how they feel. It is okay with me if they are angry at me. I wouldn't want them to keep all their feelings inside. I felt there was so much I wanted to say but in the end I stopped because I knew my father didn't care for anyone but himself and he was unwilling to change. My siblings and I had always thought our father lived another life with another family. He would go away for hours at a time and we wouldn't know where he was or who he was with. Once on father's day, after our mom had left, we came to visit him. He threw the gifts we had given him back at us. He went to visit an estranged woman in a motel room. It was at that moment I realized how much I hated my father. I hated him for not being there for us more and not even attempting to have a relationship with us. After his stroke we loved him so much. We cried with him, tried to take care of him but all he did was push us away. I have learned from this one important lesson. Be there for my children, love them, hug them, feed them. Give that love unconditionally because family is everything. I have learned you cannot live a lie. It never works out. At the end of the day ask yourself what do you really believe, who do you want to be there with you when you take your last breath on this earth. These are questions I wish I would have had the chance to ask my father before he decided to abandon his faith and abandon his family and no longer claim his responsibilities as a brother, a father, an uncle, and a grandfather. He left us , all of us. Now I have come to a crossroad in my life. I can do one of two things, learn from his mistakes and change so I can be there for my family and the second thing I can do is end my relationship with my father until our evil step mother is out of his life for good and we can have our father back in our life if only for a brief while. Maybe God will give him another chance to make things right in his life. I wish he could get divorced and I could shake him and make him realize all the people he has hurt deeply and the ones he has hurt the most are his grandchildren. Our father was stricken by grief and guilt for all of the lies he has told us. Only God can save him now. If you believe in prayer please pray for my father that he can be our dad and our grandfather again, that he can be a part of our faith again and he can be a part of our life again and not be so estranged from us as he is now. He has nothing to do with us and it breaks my heart. At times it really feels like I live in the twilight zone. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. Each day I go through the motions but there is a giant void in my life. Our children have no grandmothers. They are both deceased. I think of children who have no one, no parents or grandparents and my heart goes out to them. I also think of movie stars that have 2 and 3 mansions but yet there are those that have no home, no family. They have no one. Their heart aches because they have no one and there is no one to comfort them or listen to them.