Izu's World

My family… well… I don’t have an ordinary family – they are all overprotective of me for being the youngest, we all care a lot for each other and we are closer than most families that I know. But you see… my family consists of me, my mother, my older brother, and my grandma (and my grandpa when he was still alive).

I suppose the reason for writing this post is my father. Or at least the man who gave half of the biological material for my creation, as I consider ‘my father’ to be my grandpa who raised me and took care for me. My biological father… well… the only memories I have from him is me being sent to the nearby store to buy him alcohol, or he drinking alcohol, or me hearing about him drinking alcohol somewhere. He was the type who actually sold our furniture (and almost our apartment) to buy more alcohol and to go gamble. When my mother finally divorced him – the divorce took over a year and at the end he agreed to sign the papers after my mother took a huge loan from the bank to pay half of our apartment to him, so that he would leave, and she agreed that he won’t be paying any money for me or my brother. So… he pretty much robbed us and gave up on us.

I was 12 at the time the divorce was officially over. And if I may say – it’s a huge reason why I have so many trust issues. How can I get myself to trust strangers when my own father betrayed my trust? Meh… but this is another story…

For about a year I kept going visiting him every other Saturday – he wouldn’t take me to his place, but he would take me to a café or some low diner. We would spend a couple of hours together and he would get me back on the bus home. I hated those meetings, but I did endure them… until he dared to say that my grandparents, who raised me and my brother as my mother was too busy working day and night to support us all, had brainwashed me, that were the most horrible people on earth and other crap like this. This was the day I had the first and last fight with him. And I told him that I was no longer his child.

It’s been ten years since then. I haven’t heard of him since then. He kept calling us at odd hours in the middle of the night when he was drunk, causing more than one of my nervous breakdowns. A person who easily stresses, who is quite insomniac + getting calls in the middle of the night from a drunk horrible person =… not fun times…

And then… I don’t remember when… was it six months ago? Or even more… I don’t know. My mother got a call from my aunt – my father’s brother’s wife, that my father got a stroke and now he couldn’t move, talk properly and so on. I had a horrible time not knowing how to react. I didn’t care, but I did feel bad that I didn’t care - after all he is my father even if he had never been a father to me. But I got over it. I decided and I made it clear to my mother, brother and my aunt that I do not consider him my father, that I do not care what’s going on with him as… he is a perfect stranger to me who has caused nothing but pain in my life. So, the story was over…

Or at least I thought so. I guessed one day I’ll just get a phone call telling me he died. As horrible as it may sound - I doubt I’ll go to his funeral whenever this day comes.

However, last night I kept getting phone calls from my cousin – I didn’t pick up, and this morning my aunt contacted my mother telling her that my grandmother (my father’s mother – she said that she didn’t want to take care of us when we were babies and she never was a grandmother either) is in a hospital with a broken leg so it will be a month before she could go back to taking care for my father, so we should either go take care for him (at which I LOLed – seriously???) or we should give about $1000 per month for a nurse to go take care of him, at which I lol-ed again as this is EXTREMELY a lot over here. Thankfully my mother repeated what I told her a few months ago – these people are not our family, they turned their backs on us, they robbed us of all our savings so that we would get the apartment that was ours anyways, and now they expect us to help them?

I might sound as a horrible person – but I don’t care. Yeah, I pity them, I feel sorry for them like I would do if I hear this story about any other person – sick, etc, but… I don’t feel obliged in any way to help them. They are not my family. And they have no right to ask… no to DEMAND from us to give them money and/or care that they didn’t deserve.

Am I a horrible person? I suppose I am… but I know that if I go there even once I will breakdown… and this time it will be worse than ever. Why? Because I’m a softie and I’ll feel sorry for them and I’ll blame myself like I did for so many years – for so many years I lived with the thought that my father was a low drunk because of me (I got the idea when I was 5 and my father came home so drunk that he kept shouting at me, at the end slapped me and shouted at me something like I shouldn’t have been born and then left), I’m not going to allow them destroy my life, my family’s life, the life that we rebuilt for ourselves so hard… So yeah… I’d rather be a horrible, cold person than be destroyed again…

I don’t care…