Childhood was not easy for my brothers and I. Myself and SoftheartedToughguy were the products of RanchMama and ConfusedAddictedDaddy who were married for 11 years. RanchMama was young and so in love when I was conceived. As the years passed ConfusedAddictedDaddy experimented with drugs, drinking and violence, he was unhappy about choices he made before RanchMama. Those decisions would eternally haunt him and would prevent him from ever finding true happiness.

I remember when money was tight and our power got shut off in the home my parents were renting. It was so hot during the summers in Phoenix, we had no AC because the power bill wasn’t paid so we would intentionally wet our hair before bed to keep us cool. We used candles to light the home at night all because paying the power bill was not a priority.

I also remember walking in on my parents using drugs, this was especially confusing for me since all the teachers were telling us about how bad drugs were. I even got a lecture from my parents about how “what happens at home stays at home” and that I should never share what I see with my teachers. This created a massive internal conflict for me.

Once, when I was like 5 or 6 I was watching a VHS tape in the living room. ConfusedAddictedDaddy was sleeping on the couch and the tape ended. I didn’t know how to shut the tape off and at the end the VHS tapes would play the loud beep with all the colored lines and stuff. This beeping woke ConfusedAddictedDaddy up and he was infuriated about my not being able to shut it off so he backhanded me and I flew across the room.

The next day I had a large cut/ bruise on my face that teachers were very upset about. Everyone was told I had hurt myself… I remember times when my dad beat my mom, both my parents were taken off to jail. Childhood was crazy for me and I grew up very fast and was determined to never get into similar situations as an adult.

When I was 8 years old RanchMama drew the line and told ConfusedAddictedDaddy it was time to part. The abuse and instability had sent her over the edge and she knew it was time to move on. SoftheartedToughguy was only 3 years old when his daddy left, for both of us it was heart breaking to see daddy walking away from our apartment that night. I had witnessed and remembered enough to know it was better this way, SoftheartedToughguy had not and is now making some of the same mistakes. What is worse is that he thinks it would have been better if our parents stayed together. It is because he was just too young to remember all the bad times.

Today SoftheartedToughguy has a daughter with a young lady, LostManipulativeGirly, who also had a bad childhood. They got pregnant unexpectedly and decided to make it work despite their age difference and financial instability. Their daughter is 5 months old and things are just not working out. LostManipulativeGirly is still a minor and she just wants to be with friends and have fun, SoftheartedToughguy is 21 and he just wants his daughter to have 2 stable parents (because he didn’t).

He wont cut ties with LostManipulativeGirly because he desperately wants his daughter to have 2 stable parents. He doesn’t see that it having 2 unhappy parents can be much worse than growing up with only one stable parent. When parents aren’t happy and stable it messes kids up- I know I was there (so was he but he was too young to remember)!

He is going through some of the same stuff RanchMama did in her relationships, you think that if you want it enough and that if you work hard enough you can fix a person. You overlook all the bad parts of the relationship and convince yourself that it is better to hang on and keep trying even though it is breaking your heart and making you unhappy.

We often become victims of our circumstances, reliving the past situations in the present because it was all we knew as children. So, how do you break the cycle and when do the reruns become enough? If you don’t learn from the mistakes around you chances are you will grow up to repeat them, over and over until you finally learn the lesson.

It is heartbreaking that you can’t learn lessons for others or make them see what you see, they just have to learn for themselves… Life is crazy like that.

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Filed under: ConfusedAddictedDaddy, DirtyLaundryDiva, LostManipulativeGirly, RanchMama, SoftheartedToughguy