Father�s Day just passed. I actually got my dad a card. I know it sounds harsh but I my whole life I resented my dad for the things he had done and not done. After I moved away from home our relationship improved but it wasn�t until last December that I was finally able to forgive him for his transgressions and see him in a new light.

I�d always known that I was an �accident�. My parents were young and unmarried. Mom was seventeen. Dad twenty-one. My mom accepted her fate as a young mother. She was fortunate to have been brought up in a very nurturing home and provided the same for me. My dad on the other hand was raised in�well he wasn�t really raised at all. He was born to a woman who has no motherly instinct, no nurturing capabilities and is pretty much a menace to society. Having no father and a mother who was anything but were the weak foundation for his upbringing.

My dad was the oldest of six, wait make that seven, I just found out he had another brother that was given up for adoption. With five fatherless and virtually motherless younger siblings in the house he took on the responsibility of raising them. And in the meantime put up with a lot of abuse from the various men his mother brought into the house. By the age of twenty-one my dad was through raising kids. He had graduated high school, an accomplishment few members of his family ever completed, and had even begun taking classes at the community college. Then he met my mom. The accident happened and they named her Nicole.

As a child I couldn�t rationalize his behavior. All I knew is that he was an intelligent man so why couldn�t he just do what was right? He became an alcoholic and an irresponsible father. As an adult I can be thankful that he always had one foot, or sometimes just a toe, in reality that kept our family afloat but what I needed as a child was to be able to trust my father.