Celebrating Two 10-year Anniversaries this Fall

Content warning: Abuse, cancer

Since we met in 2012, we said that we always wanted to go to Dublin. Back then, I think a lot of it had to do with the drinking culture that we were around in college, with dreams to visit the Guinness factory and all of the whisky distilleries.

But like time, we've evolved. We still wanted to go to Ireland, but more for seeing the sights, the cities, and the little towns on across the country.

What better time to do that than on the 10th anniversary of our wedding.

The world is falling apart, but we've been saving up in a separate account for a special trip, and on our 10th anniversary of our wedding on October 16, 2025, we'll be in Dublin and London for eight days.

I am so excited that we get the opportunity to do this, and while 99 percent of my attention and focus will be on that, there's another anniversary that will take up that final 1 percent.

Because it was on my wedding day 10 years ago that I last saw and spoke to my biological father.

We were already falling out–we have throughout our relationship–but three years after the death of my stepmother, I was still in the stage of understanding where I knew that he was grieving, and I told myself that it was the grief that was responsible for his behavior since she died, not him.

So, I felt obligated to have him at our wedding, basically so that he couldn't use it against me.

We had a small service. Maybe 14 people were there, including him and my grandmother.

But it was clear that day that there wouldn't be a relationship moving forward, so I cut him off, cold turkey.

I reached the point of understanding in my life and reflection in my life, being able to recognize the abuse that took place in that household when I was growing up.

From being physically abused by his wife, while he stood there and watched, as she would pin my arms down and punch me over and over again, to being kicked out of the house on the day I turned 18 by his wife, because I was able to fend for myself (I was a good kid, I swear). To being told at 6 years old that my mother was a terrible person who was trying to drive a wedge between me and my father and his wife. To being forced to pay for my own clothes, groceries, and doing all of the laundry, cleaning, and cooking in the house from the age of 14 on.

I thought it was just a strict childhood, but living in a van at the age of 18 is not a childhood.

It's abuse.

It wasn't easy to cut him off. No, not at all. Deep down, that was my dad. My hero. Did he teach me anything useful in life like how to shave, how to do taxes, what the hell Escrow is, how to take care of myself, or anything like that? No, but he made the weekends fun.

He would take me to baseball games and the science center. He would play catch with me in the backyard.

He was someone that I loved and looked up to.

But when I was kicked out of the house, living in my van, I lost contact with both of them. My high school girlfriends family–thank you to this day, Sharon–took me in for a full year at their house. So after 1 month, I went to a Sunday church service.

Because yes, you guessed it, they were both Godly people, and he was a pastor at said church.

When I got there, I remember vividly him coming up to my and my then-girlfriend Brittany, smiling and saying, "Good to see you. I hope we're still friends."

I said, "I don't need a friend, I need a father."

The relationship was touch-and-go from then on, as I visited occasionally when I was in college, but for the most part, I kept my distance until my stepmom had cancer.

It was a 3-year battle, but in August 2012, she passed away from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

It wasn't a good ending, but I was there for the final 10 days when she was on hospice at the house.

It was me and my dad.

I was there when she took her last breath. I was there to call the coroner. I was there when they put her body in a body bag.

Because he couldn't be.

I was there to organize the funeral. To put the pictures together. To answer the door for people when they came to the house to offer their condolences.

Because he couldn't be.

I was there to console in the front yard when he broke down and fell to his knees. And hey, he lost his wife. I get it. It's hard, and there's no way to grieve appropriately. I almost lost mine, and it still impacts me daily.

But I wasn't able to grieve at all, and that really, really messed me up for years.

When I cut him off, I had anger at first. Frustration. Annoyance. Hurt. Rage. Depression. Fear. Second-guessing.

Any single emotion that you could think of, I had.

I went to my hometown outside of Pittsburgh in 2018 to visit a high school and college friend, and he told me that he and his wife were running a bit late, so I said that I could kill some time.

I realized at that time, that all of the pent-up anger and depression I had for my father was surfacing. And I’m pretty sure it’s because I was in that area.

I needed to tell my father to go fuck himself.

I'm not proud of what I did. And honestly, I'm so glad that it didn't work out. Because I would have had regrets to this day and beyond.

But I drove to his house–our childhood home–to confront him, before finding out that he defaulted on the mortgage in part because he used the life insurance from my stepmom's death to buy a dream car instead.

So I drove to his mother's house, my grandma's house, and rang the doorbell and knocked. No one was home.

I left after 10 minutes, and I found out that he was working at a movie theater located in a mall.

So I went there, and I asked for him. He wasn't working that day.

I finally just went to my car and broke down and cried.

I don't know what I would have said to him. I don't know if I would have said anything.

"Fuck you!"

"Why wasn't I good enough?"

"Why didn't you invite me to your wedding?"

"Why didn't you come to my graduation but you went to someone's from the church instead?"

"Do you take any ownership?"

So many scenarios could have played out, and I'm so glad they didn't.

I told myself after that day, I needed to address this in a healthy way in therapy, because I wouldn't allow him to have that hold over me anymore.

He was blocked on all social media accounts. I blocked his number, too. He had his best friend–the senior pastor of the church–reach out to me to see what I did because, "he is so hurt and confused why his children don't want him in their lives."

Mind you, living 20 minutes from my sister and two kids, he said,"I see them grow up on Facebook. It's the same thing."

Hmm, I wonder why, Pastor?

But, being the curious person that I am who is continuing to work on his emotional growth in 2018, I saw that he made a second Instagram account. It's been said that this point that he's already been conned out of any money he had leftover from catfish accounts, email scams, and other ways that his church would frown upon.

But when I saw his profile say, "Pastor. Painter. Patriot," that was all the confirmation that I needed that I made the right call.

He was dead to me. His family was dead to me because they are racist, bigoted people, and apparently they don't have a relationship anymore, either.

But like a typical narcissist, that isn't on him, either. That's their fault.

How do I know that?

Well, recently, I added Facebook again because I had to switch over my work profiles after getting a new job. I saw a livestream from the church that he preaches at, and it was him, on my screen.

I didn't feel the fear, shock, or anger that I once did, I just felt sad.

I felt sad for him, for missing out on my life, my partner. I felt sad for him that he missed out on seeing his nieces grow up despite being 20 minutes away from each other. I felt said for him that, despite being a man of God, that he is a huge Elon Musk, RFK, and Donald Trump fan (seriously, I need to get better at my emotional growth but I did stumble across his Threads account one day and yikes. I blocked him there, too).

I felt sad for him that he texted me from a new number when his mother died, and my only response was to block that number, too.

I felt sad for him when I listened to a snippet of his sermon, only to hear him blame his family for not wanting him in their life (me, my sister, his siblings, their kids), and also that he doesn't "hate gay or lesbian people, but he feels bad for them because they are living a life of sin and won't ever have what he has. He doesn't condone sin, and they are going to hell."

I feel bad for him because when I was 12, I heard him tell our neighbor that, "Michael won't do anything with his life. He wants to be a general manager for a sports team, but I think he's going to waste away, stay here, and never have a true life."

I didn't confront him in 2018 to tell him to go fuck himself. But when I moved down to Georgia and closed on our house, one of the 100 thoughts I had that day running through my head was that I did it.

I did it without you.

I don't need you. I never needed you. And I'm finally at peace.

When he dies, do I know how I'll feel?

No, I don't. He's 72, so it's something that will happen in the not-so distant future. It's easy to say that I will feel relief. That I'll feel mad or happy.

Or that I'll feel nothing at all.

The truth is, I don't know how I'll feel.

But if this piece is any indication, I think that I'll just feel sad.

Not sad that he's gone, but sad on what could have been.