An alternative Father’s Day message

Because not everyone has a dad they remember fondly

Happy Father’s Day

Thanks ‘dad’

For not being there when I was born. They had to track you down. Great start, hey?

Thanks ‘dad’

For the time you left me in the cinema alone for the entire duration of a film when I was just 3 years old. Pete’s Dragon. Didn’t matter though, because you came and picked me up at the end, right?

Thanks ‘dad’

For using my doll’s dress to mop up oil in the garage, even though I cried and begged you not to. *Laughs* “It’s just a doll, we can buy you a new one”.

Thanks ‘dad’

For selling our dog without telling us. Once she’d earned you some money, was past her prime, what did she count?

Thanks ‘dad’

For never once attending a single school play, concert or sport’s day I was in. For never spending Christmas Day with us. Always choosing to work because you’d make ‘double time’.

Thanks ‘dad’

For telling me you’d take me to Disney World…….. I was so excited…….then gambling it all away the next night at Salford casino.

Thanks ‘dad’

For the time aged 11,  I woke in the night to find the police raiding our house.

Thanks ‘dad’

For the taunts I had to endure because you were in jail, the pity from teachers. The parents who told their kids not to play with me.  The newspapers with your name on I had to read.

Thanks ‘dad’

For having us move away to another town for months and lay low because one of your dodgy mates had threatened to kill us. Leave my friends behind. By the time I returned, they’d all moved on.

Thanks ‘dad’

For the time you got a woman to impersonate my mum in the bank so you were able draw out the savings and squander it away without her consent.

Thanks ‘dad’

For writing nasty letters with veiled threats to my grandma as she grieved my grandad.

Thanks ‘dad’

For the time I came out of school to find a family friend in the carpark telling me you’d done an armed robbery with a sawn off shotgun. “I wouldn’t have killed anyone….would only have shot him in the foot.”

Thanks ‘dad’

For not recognising me, actually asking who I was - your own teenage daughter - when you saw me at a family funeral.

Thanks ‘dad’

For making me so nervous that for about ten years I jumped out of my skin every time someone so much as knocked on the door, I turned the TV and lights off when alone in the house, thanks to your associates ringing up, hammering on the windows and shouting through our letterbox.

Thanks ‘dad’

For teaching me about fraud “After you take out a loan, you always make the first few repayments so they think you’re genuine.” Nice.

Thanks ‘dad’

For scoring weed for my brother and having to find out you use prostitutes. Classy.

Still……it’s like you used to say;

“But Jewel, I don’t hurt little kids……I’m not a rapist or a murderer.”

Small mercies, eh?

I’m sure that helped you feel tons better.

Me? Not so much.

But seriously, thank you.

Because no matter how I screw up as a mum, I know I will never be as shit as you were a dad.

You were the ultimate example of what not to do.

You fucking loser.

*This is not my higher self speaking by the way.

No-one is perfect and I wish no harm.

I also know that people had way worse childhoods than mine.  We are all to some extent a product of our own family history, predisposition to mental illness and what life serves us.

Sometimes, you just feel like venting, don’t you?

I look at the toddler in the photo and know she deserved better.

That’s all.