I’m sorry. I still miss my grandmother a lot. I never had a “normal” nuclear sort of family growing up as my grandmother raised me for the most part. Now that’s she’s gone, and has been since near 9/11 of 2001 there’s no more thanksgivings where we went to Trenton on the New Jersey Transit.
I miss my grandmother a lot and I’m glad she was there to raise me when my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Do not feel bad, you are doing a lot better for your child than a lot of men out there who don’t even want to get involved with the babies they made. You’re trying, give yourself credit for that.
Evelyn and I took an extended nap last night. I woke up first and made her some chicken nuggets with macaroni and cheese. I heard her little footsteps against my mom’s hard wood floor as she stumbled into the kitchen with a shitty diaper and Don King-esque hair. I grabbed her diapers, cleaned the shit off of her and made sure the water on the stove didn’t overflow. I brushed her hair and wiped the snot off her face, put her in a high chair and attempted to feed her. That is the life I spent nine months preparing for, and it’s the exact reason I can’t find contentedness anywhere I look in my every day life. No one is really ready to be a parent, at least not the first time around, but when you know you’re about to stumble into a new brand of life, you kind of just assume that the old life is over.
For me, that just hasn’t been the case.
Five days out of the week, I’m still by myself. I don’t change diapers. I don’t cook food. I don’t do a fucking thing except sit here and wish I’d made different decisions than I did. It’s counter-productive because I can’t fix anything I’ve fucked up.
But it doesn’t stop there. Every Wednesday and Sunday, I pick Evelyn up at the police station in town and sit witness to Jessica’s actual family; the one I wasn’t ever able to be a part of, and I just feel fucked defeated. I look at her and see that she’s married, has two kids she gets to see every day, and a shitload of bills that are probably driving her batshit crazy.
I can’t help but feel robbed. This feeling is very similar to how I used to feel when my parents first got divorced. I remember being in the lunch room and looking at the clock saying, “I don’t have a family anymore” to the kids at my table the day they made their divorce final. I obviously still had a family, but it’s never really the same after a divorce. For a long time, I was really jealous of the kids that got to bring both of their parents to the parent-teacher conferences, and I harbored a lot of anger that I didn’t get those same opportunities. I had a lot of sadness reserved for my parents. I felt like my mom had a new life and didn’t love me anymore; as a result, we fought for about five years consistently. I felt like my dad was too busy with his new girlfriends. I stopped giving a shit about anything.
This has been a continued journey up into my own adulthood.
I feel, truly at the core of me, that I have already failed my daughter. I got ten years to know what a traditional family was. That’s a long time. Evelyn didn’t get a fucking thing, and it isn’t fair. I failed her. I can’t forgive myself for that, no matter how hard I try.
I look at Jessica and feel those same feelings, but from a mirrored perspective. I’m a father that doesn’t get to be a dad most of the time. Five days out of the week, I don’t have to clean shitty / pissy diapers I don’t get to tuck Evelyn in at night. I wake up every morning in a bed by myself; not excluding a single morning where Evelyn wakes up before me. I wake up with this mentality every single day. I look around at these four walls and it feels the exact same way that lunchroom felt when I was in fourth grade. My whole life, I think, I’ve been searching for a family that doesn’t exist.
I stayed with Jessica for half-a-decade and I think a lot of it was because she felt like that to me. Some days, like yesterday for example, I forget that she’s not part of my family anymore. I look at her the same way I did four years ago, sometimes. I have an extremely hard time admitting that, and it’s something I haven’t bothered to admit ever since we broke up. When I look in my daughters eyes, I see Jessica. Often. When I look in Jessica’s eyes, I see my daughter. It makes me feel ill because I know deep down I still care about Jessica. As long as those two share a set of eyeballs, I feel like this will always be the case. It really does break me in a million pieces that she doesn’t give a fuck about me anymore, because she was really the only one that I felt ever did. It’s a big void in my chest that I can’t ever fill. There are not enough drugs in this world to fill that void.
I spend a lot of my Wednesdays and Sundays directly avoiding eye contact with Jessica because of this. It makes me melt, kind of, and I temporarily miss her. I miss going to Fiesta and getting fat together. I miss driving around in a car she totaled recently. I miss all that shit. I miss feeling like I was loved and appreciated; like I had a family of my own.
I don’t know what I always do wrong, but it seems like I don’t deserve a family or something. Every time I think I have something secure in my life, it leaves me.
Really, I’m writing this because when I picked Evelyn up yesterday, I thought Jessica looked really pretty. That’s one feeling I’ve been able to throw away pretty consistently since we broke up.
I don’t know what to do, anymore. I feel broken. I feel worthless.
I keep thinking that my grandma is going to die soon. I think when she does go, the family I do have will evaporate. There will never be another Thanksgiving dinner. There will never be another family Christmas. I’ll probably lose contact with 95% of the people I see on a regular basis now. I don’t know what I have in this world, anymore. I’m realizing the importance of family in retrospect, feeling like I don’t really have one, and it sucks.
I’m so fucking lonely, I could just cry. But I don’t. I sit here and pretend everything is okay, but I never cry. It’s just something I don’t feel like I can do anymore. I don’t feel alive five days out of the week, and I don’t know why I bother when I’m two days away from seeing my daughter again.
I’ve already failed her. It hurts.
