I’ve grown up with men that were less than ideal when it came to the parenting department. Not only were they awful at being parents, but they were just unpleasant people in general. A perfect example of a horrendous man would be my dad, Don. He is the definition of a jerk that doesn’t meet the standards of a socially acceptable human. He will rip out your soul and eat it for breakfast. He should have been someone to avoid but my mom was already caught by his fake charm. Their relationship wasn’t supposed to last, it was supposed to be a fling, he wasn’t marriage material. That was until my mom announced that she was very pregnant with me. Causing them to marry shortly after I was born. Thus the s*** show began. Don, that wretched piece of man, left us for an addiction to some unmentionable substances. Before he left, my mom gave him two options it was either his family or the addiction. Lets just say he definitely didn’t choose us.

After a few years of staying in Ridgeway a very tiny town with little to enjoy, we yet again moved to a very sketchy town, Janesville. It was there that I met yet another wretched man that went by the name, Russ. He was decent to my sister and I but was rude to Austin, my brother. When I was younger, I thought it was just a game, but looking back at it, Russ was mean to Austin because he saw Austin as competition towards his two sons. He always pointed out Austin’s shortcomings and highlighted his boy’s successes. The oddest memory I remember was the times that my mom and Russ would fight. They would be up in the room for hours on end as us kids sat on the stairs waiting for them to come out. We really wanted to eat dinner that night. It usually was around seven that they would then emerge from the room and get started on making dinner. I always wondered what happened when they were up there for hours. Now, I wish I didn’t know.
I see my mom walking into the lunchroom, tears streaking her cheeks. She is holding my younger siblings hands as she mouths to me:” It’s time to go.” I look around the lunchroom where all my classmates and friends are seated, remembering I couldn’t tell them about us leaving this treacherous town. I stand slowly taking in the details of my school; I do not want to forget these defining moments of my life. I look back at my mom and I find her eyes darting back and forth looking around the lunchroom. What is she looking for? He cannot be here. She frantically waves me down. I run to her, and as I near her she tells me to keep running to her car outside. I’m instructed to jump into the U-Haul as my siblings jump into the back, my mom races out of the parking lot in record time. Off to Mount Horeb, hopefully it is better than Janesville.
After a few years of living in Mount Horeb, things were only getting worse. My mom was constantly away working which meant I was responsible for my two younger siblings. If it was a weekend endeavor my mom hired a babysitter to take care of us, due to the fact that the only food I knew how to make at the time was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and mac and cheese. This made us kids feel lonely, we wanted our mom for ourselves, considering we were living without a father, with less love than others received. I wanted to know what a whole family would feel like, one without fighting or favorites. I craved a father figure, watching all the kids at school interact with their fathers put envy in my soul, at times, I would fight with my mom trying to convince her to get a new boyfriend, one with potential. I needed to show off a new dad.
  One day my mom told us she happened to be leaving on a weekend trip with her new boyfriend, none of us were aware that she decided to date again, leaving us a little skeptical; mostly because we didn’t want another less than ideal father figure in our life again. We were sent to our Grandma’s as our mom was on vacation. When it came time for our mom to pick us up, my Grandma received a call from my mom, she said that George, her new boyfriend, would be picking us up in a hour.

This must be him. What happens if he is a serial killer with piercing all over his body and tattoos covering his body? Even worse, what happens if he hates kids? Does she really expect me to get in the car with him when I’ve never met him before. She must be insane. A tall thin man stands before me. He has a big grin with strikingly straight teeth. He has dark brown hair and light brown eyes. I look down, despite his huge smile, you can see his hand trembling at his waist as he waits for us to confront his presence. That little tiny addition to his profile lighted my rapidly beating heart. I knew he wasn’t like the rest. If he was nervous he couldn’t be a bad man. That trembling showed that he was nervous to meet us, he cared about our opinion. I was sure my mom finally found an ideal man who would treat us with the respect and love we finally deserved.

When we walked outside with George, we noticed a white Lexus in my Grandma’s driveway, surely it must be his car. Wow what does he do for a living, this must be a good car, he must be a pretty successful man. He opens the car doors for us and we are off. In the car, he made small talk with us. As the conversation died down, he put on the music, his music taste suggested he was a DJ. It was mostly dubstep, I decided that if he saw our mom more often, I would ask him about what he did for a living.

I sang along to the songs that I knew. When all of a sudden George turned the music to an almost inaudible level. I stopped singing. He turned it up again. I sang again. This process kept repeating. He was messing around with me, he wanted to hear me sing. I already knew my voice was less than ideal for the human ears. I decided to stop singing along to the music. He seemed displeased with himself when he noticed I no longer sang along to the music. This was a little insight into my relationship with George now, we are always messing with each other. Always embarrassing each other in public. Everything is always a joke for us, making life at home bearable.

As we saw George more, I noticed that not all men were dirt bags, he was a genuinely nice man that was able to joke around and be loving and still enforce rules without hitting or yelling. This was important to us because our father used to hit us when we were naughty and when he wasn’t hitting us, he was yelling uncontrollably about any and everything. We as a family needed a strong man who didn’t enforce rules by hitting us rather, taking away meaningful objects for a short period of time or grounding us. Most importantly, he made our mom happy. I never saw her that happy in my short time on this world. Instead of frantically going about her day, she was leisurely enjoying it. A beautiful smile would appear on her face anytime she received a text. At her best, she was constantly laughing, smiling and seemed present.

Everything about her new personality  was infectious, I began to believe that I could be happy too.
The only problem being, George didn’t live with us. He could easily leave and we’d be stuck without a good man in our lives. Our mom needed him more than anything else. The days he didn’t stay with us were the worst days of the week. She was yelling and stressing about every little thing, his presence instantly calmed her down. He seemed to be the perfect drug to bring my old mom back. He could calm her down with just one smile. We needed him to stay. He made life at our house enjoyable instead of dreading the night after school, we were excited to see how our mom would be. I prefered a smile on her face rather than a frown, George could easily grant my wish.

As we moved into our third place in Mount Horeb it felt like he was at our house every day and night. He basically lived with us, just not officially. That summer that we moved into the new place, we, to our dismay, went to visit Don. It marked the worse two months of my life. He wasn’t parent material, he yelled, made me do his nasty laundry along with his new girlfriend’s laundry. I cleaned the entire house top to bottom and if it wasn’t done right, I, being forced, cleaned it all over again. Don would constantly yell at us for the way the house was cleaned and blamed us for taking his money. He’d even plot us against each other. I told him about Calista’s lying and in return, he locked our bedroom door and hit her so I couldn’t help. I called my mom feeling like I wronged my sister,  I blamed myself. It was my fault for her pain if I didn’t mention her lying, that moment wouldn’t have happened. When he finally unlocked the door, I swore that  I would call the police if there was even a slight bruise on her. My mom heard everything even the part where he said he would show me abuse if I didn’t leave the bedroom and give him my phone. I refused. I already knew how it felt. I hated his house, I hated the state, I hated him, most of all, I hated my life. As I was sitting in my sorrows, I received a phone call from my mom, she came bearing good news, George was going to move in this summer as we were at Don’s house, once we got back, he would be all moved in. This changed the summer for me. I needed to survive this summer to have a healthy life with my new family.

Shortly after moving in, he asked me if he could marry my mother, I said yes immediately. As they said their vows and I do’s I had a revelation. It was something George preached to me often when I cried to him about never having a father figure and how it made me feel awful and unloved. He told me, family didn’t mean blood,  I never understood and never felt that statement although I wished I could. Standing there watching his eyes sparkle as my mom smiled and put his wedding ring on his finger, I felt it, my whole body was flushed with love and belonging. He was and is my father, and it doesn’t matter that we don’t share any DNA, he showed me love when no one else did. He was more of a father than the one that contributed part of his genes to me. He took me in with open arms and gave no judgement. I was overwhelmed but yet content. I knew that he’d be my forever father and it didn’t bother me that our blood wasn’t the same that we weren’t tied together somehow, the bond we shared was stronger than sharing genes with him or anybody else. I was finally daddy’s girl.

I’ve grown up with men that were less than ideal when it came to the parenting department. Until I met George. He proved to me that real men do not rip out your soul and eat it for breakfast. Real men treated everyone with kindness whether you’re nice to them or not. Although times were tough with my mom and his relationship, he stuck through it fighting for his family, he knew we deserved it. He loved us fiercely never mentioning to us that he wasn’t biologically our father. At the end of the day we are family and no matter what, we are always there for each other even if it begins to look rocky.