The Escape

I would say in my life the hardest thing I've had to face is leaving my dad. Throughout my childhood it was a known fact that my dad was not in the right mind, and that he needed help. My father was an alcoholic. As soon as I understood the situation as a young child around the age of 4 I did all I could to help him. This involved me always crying to him asking him to stop, and me hiding his full beer cans so he wouldn't drink them later on in the night. My dad being an alcoholic means we rarely could see his personality, instead it was just drunken rage. Living like this was not easy, there were times where as a family we were scared for our lives. It got to a point where we had to be surveillanced at times by police officers from the amount my mom had to call the cops. Not feeling safe at home is the scariest feeling, and being so young I had nowhere else to go. There were times where me and my brother would be forgotten at school or other places because my mom had to work and my dad was the only one that could get us, we would wait for hours waiting for just someone to be there for us. Usually that someone would be my mom, rushing to get us from work. Not getting into too much gruesome depth about this situation, feeling unsafe at home was getting to be too much for all of us. By the time I was 8 my mom made the strongest choice for us, and we left our father. I remember this night exactly, things were getting dangerously bad and my mom told us we were going on a trip. We quickly packed so little things and got our new puppy on our leash and drove. Being a little kid I didn't understand much of what was going on, but seeing my mom crying in a church parking lot while calling her mom, basically asking her what she does now was very hard to see. What I learned from this experience is yes it may have been hard at the time, but the hardest part for me was getting through the trauma afterwards. The trauma that took me so long to get over I couldn't even talk about my dad until 2020 without crying or having an anxiety attack. I do think this hard recovery made me stronger in a way because going through all of that I had to learn methods to get over my anxiety attacks and through the hard to think about memories, and I now use them almost everyday. It has made my anxiety a lot easier to deal with when it gets bad. To this day I am still not in contact with my father because I know he's still not better, and I still worry about the day I may see him in public when I am doing my own thing. I know that I will be strong enough to overcome the emotions from this, because I will not let him break me again.