Although the blog states blessed father...looking at my beginning it will most certainly not look like any blessings were present in my early years, and a few after that. My parents got divorced when I was about 3 years old, this was due to our safety and out of fear for our lives that my mother did this (we will visit this again later).
So in a nutshell, as to not linger on the negative too much, although these things are the events that moulded me in the man I am today. Ok... classic alcoholic father, aggressive and abusive. He cheated on my mom, threatened her, and me, at gun-point, and that was the end of their marriage. Over the coming years I was bombarded with lies from both sides of the divorce, this luckily ended when I saw the truth for myself.
My mother then got married again, she was warned about the new husband, I mean she was his 3rd or 4th wife...yes I know...her choice to have made. He was the opposite of my father, church man, steady job and his children loved him. Then he lost his job and the cracks started to show...he became verbally and mentally abusive to both myself and my mom. Now you may ask what does this mean...I'll tell you by giving some examples: He would walk into the house great everyone and walk past me and ignore me for the rest of the evening. Some days at the dinner table he would sigh heavily when my mom and I talk to each other, or he would just stand up and walk away. Other times he would ask my best friend, whom he despised how the Indoor cricket went, and simply just ignore me. So these are a few examples, my favourite was when he ignored us for days..hehe some irony in the fact that he could not hurt me then.
In the meanwhile my biological father started his downwards spiral...he could not keep a job, had so many females in and out of his life, then he ended up in jail (blaming my mother when we spoke, the truth of this will come out later). O did I mention he too got married, without telling me and leaving it as a surprise for me the weekend I went to visit him. The then girlfriend and wife to be was pregnant, she was 10 years older than me and her baby was 10 years younger then me...weird right!!! I really loved my sister as a big brother should, but after my dad ended up divorcing her mother too, I lost all contact with her. Until my dad came back to live closer to us both, with his brother, jobless, still an alcoholic and still lying to everyone and blaming others for his current situation. I ten had 4 years of eye-opening truths about my dad, and sadly about my mother too. The 5th year after him moving closer to us, he committed suicide. Ooo don't think this is the end of his influence on my life...nooo still plenty of pain and anger that had to be resolved. On a quick side note, the last 6 months of his time on earth, we made peace, over the phone and had hours of decent conversations for the first time in 19 years.
Ok so my journey to fatherhood did not start off with good role models...but God had placed so many other fatherly figures in my life, some I only "saw" as mentors later in my life, but wow did they impact my life for the better.
Some positive news... `I am a devoted husband and an awesome dad, with plenty of faults, to two amazing boys. We will end this chapter here, I want to tackle each character in my life separately as to show how they impacted me, yes we will criss-cross to the other, that's how life works.
