I’ve never gotten along with my father; we’ve never understood each other and we’ve always been very different people. When I was 13 he left, and thus ended the time when we would be in each others lives on a day to day basis. He tried his best to maintain some semblance of parental control by enforcing a set of rules on my sister and I from outside our house, but as the first couple years passed and we got used to him not being there, his authoritarian grip quickly loosened, and eventually was removed. From then on my father became someone that I was related to, but not someone I would know anymore than an acquaintance.
However the older I get in this age of my life, the more I come to realise the things that he had to face and better understand what kind of choices he had in front of him. I still find that I don’t agree with the things that he did, but at least I feel I can appreciate what his circumstances were and how he could have taken the forks in the road that he did. I also feel I understand why he had such problems relating to his own father, and why they spent nearly a decade not talking to each other.
Funny how history repeats itself.
Andy.
