Chapter 76

Now, in Chapter 31, I did mention how it was kind of obvious that there was something to be said about New Zealand. I mean. My dad didn’t have a phone and didn’t speak a lick of English. Why go to New Zealand of all places? It was just so random. 

Well. The answer to that question is…

It wasn’t his decision. 

Dad had gone off to New Zealand with my trust fund money to restart his life right after he divorced my mom because of his pregnant girlfriend. 

She was the reason he left. 

I understood my mom’s situation a bit better now. I could even understand why she had to call me. She had just found out some information about her last days of marriage and it sucked. I think personally this was just about some of the worst news she could have ever gotten. 

Did she deserve it? Probably not. I mean, she used me as a means to coerce my dad to stay with her and her gambit had not paid off. It failed. Miserably. I didn’t keep dad honest. He still cheated. Then he ran away and took a chunk of my finances with him. 

It was now around 4AM in the morning. Mom was still angry. She told me that she had over-reached a bit with dad when they conversed. She told me she had offered dad a place to stay in Canada and be a part of our family again. Then she also told me that she told him how she’s never really had a connection with anyone else besides him. 

I believed this. I mean the closest person she had besides dad was me and you should know now how she and I grew up. I was always a second thought. Despite that, I never considered how lonely she was until that point. The only problem was, dad had moved on already. In fact, he had moved on even before their marriage was over. This was a vulnerable side of mom that I never knew about and to be honest, never really wanted to know about. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. It got kind of quiet after she mentioned all that. 

Then, as if to cut the silence to prevent things from getting any worse, she moved back to the facts. Dad had a small house in New Zealand and had settled down with the other woman. They also had kids. That’s right. Not 1. Two. I realized that I now had two half siblings, a boy and a girl. This was too much to step away from for dad and she knew it. But yet she still tried. 

She told me then that she used her trump card. She was, of course, referring to me. She told dad how I was in a program that would lead to me becoming an optometrist. A decent career with a decent salary. If he ditched the other family and joined us here, they’d be set. I had a need for anything and she owned property despite all his stealing. He didn’t budge. 

This was beginning to become sickening. There was way too much toxicity now. While I was initially saddened by her attempt at reaching out to dad, when she mentioned she’d asked him to leave their family and be with ours, I got angry. Why would you even suggest that? Why would you want him back in our lives? We were almost at a stage where we would have want for nothing. Why does he get to just jump right back in when things are going well? How do you still have feelings for that guy? 

I felt the anger build up within me. Before I became someone who scolded their mom for being vulnerable, I decided to end the call. This was the only good decision that happened that night. Had I stayed on the phone longer. Things would have gotten uglier. 

After hearing all of that, I was now fully awake and alone in my CLV room. I looked outside at the moon. While staring at it, a picture of both my mom and my dad came into my head.

“I’m sick of your shit.”

I wasn’t referencing mom. I was referencing both of them. I was done with all the bullshit they’ve been through. Amidst all of those conversations, the thing that I took away from it all? Not once was I seen as anything more than a pawn to be used to manipulate each other. 

I thought I was doing well and living the dream of becoming an eye doctor. It was a hard crawl up to the program I was in and honestly, I thought that for sure, my mom would now care about me more seeing as how I was, by most measurements, a success. However, as it turns out I was never even in the running for the main story line my mom was living. 

Her life’s narrative was always about dad. 

I had always just been a character on the side.