When I was a young child, I lived with my parents and two older sisters. I don’t remember that time very much because it only lasted until I was 3 years old. At this age, my parents got a divorce shortly, only weeks, after my birthday.
My mother, me, and my sisters moved in with my grandparents. She stayed with us for around 6 months while my father found a cheap area to live in the area. Thankfully, they both still had a job in order to support themselves and attempt to assist us.
After my mother moved out of my grandparents house, she was dating someone new. Although she had custody of us, she wasn’t around as much as she should have been. This was due to a boyfriend who didn’t want anything to do with us and her lack of funds to care for us.
At that time, my father saw me on Wednesday and on the weekends. I was my father’s only child back then and still am. He did everything he could to be around, especially when I was really young between the ages of 3 and 5. I appreciate that more than he understands to this day.
When I was 5 years old, the situation with my mother hadn’t changed much, but my father had to move about 3 hours away. It was required for him to be able to afford to live because of his new job. Because I was this young, I didn’t understand that yet, but I understood that he couldn’t come around during the week like he used to. That hurt for me. He had never gone a week without seeing me yet.
Shortly after the move, my mom took me and my older sister on vacation. It was a week long vacation and my father wasn’t ready to be away from me for that long yet. I was distracted like any young child would be and was enjoying being outside running around, but I did miss my dad.
A few years later, when I was 9 or 10 years old, my mother started bringing me and my older sister to stay with her a lot more often. She was having issues with her boyfriend and started to distance herself more and more from him. This was the first time she would get a pet since before the divorce with my father.
When I was 11, my mother would finally break up with him in front of us. She told him to leave the house while me and my sister took our cats to our rooms. We, at that young of age, were scared of him taking one of our cats with him. It was the cat that he had found in the first place, but we later learned that he didn’t want the cat.
At 12 years old, my mother started dating my current step-father. He took really well to one of my sisters and I have always felt he was alright. I didn’t like the fact that he was, what I felt, invading my privacy with having my mother and sister the only ones around. I liked being independent and wasn’t fond of having another person in the house.
After a few years, my mother and step-father have now been married for 5 years. Although they have rough patches, we all feel like they’ll be together for quite awhile if not forever. This has given my mother more confidence in taking care of me because I’m the only one that is at home very much with my older sisters either living with other family or staying with a significant other often.
What I would change
For me, I wish that my father and mother could’ve been around more than they were. This would have involved my father not having to move away to have a good job and my mother not dating a man that wanted nothing to do with having children around while being with a woman who had 3 of them.
Although I wish those things would’ve been different, me and my parents are closer now than we ever were. My mother has let my father live with us while he’s unemployed and we’re all getting along as well as can be expected. Although my sisters both have either been, or began, turning away from the family, we have a family put together now. We didn’t used to be able to say that.
Finally
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Happy Blogging – This post was a response to the prompt Childhood Revisted by TheDailyPost.
My Life Story 