You Were a Hero in My Eyes

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I'm not going to lie. I don't know if I'll actually click publish once I'm done writing this.

I've never really had a problem putting my heart and soul on my blog. There's very little that y'all don't know about me. But there are things I hold back. Things that I'm not yet ready to share, or things that I just don't understand enough to put words to.

This is one of those things. But I feel like I have to try, because I'm feeling really effing alone right now.

So here are the basics . . . I haven't spoken to my father in five years. Before that our relationship was unbelievably rocky. Before that . . . I was his little girl, he was my Daddy and the world was perfect.

I had made peace with the fact that I didn't have my father in my life. I could talk about him easily as though he were a character on television. I no longer felt connected. We were two separate human beings walking around on this earth, and aside from a little DNA, there was nothing else that held us together. And I was okay with that. Or so I thought.

Last night I signed onto Facebook to find that my step-mother had sent me a friend request. She and I get along well, and she even calls me on my birthday, wishes me well and then hands the phone to my little brothers.

For some reason, being suddenly connected to her on the internet got me curious. And I typed his name into the search engine. Low and behold, his Facebook profile appeared. And even though I have pictures of him in my scrapbooks and photo albums, seeing that recent image of him did something. It hit a nerve. And I lost it.

Spent most of the night crying. Effing daddy issues.

"Why don't you just call him up?" I hear some of you saying.

And that's a good question. But you see, there's a problem with that. Because right now the picture of my father online that I'm looking at isn't the one on his Facebook profile. No, it's the one I found when I searched the recent inmate rosters at the county jail website. His most recent mugshot. And when I say most recent, I mean to say that there's more than one.

Plenty more.

My name is Jia, and I'm an adult child of an addict.

And for most of my life I've been okay with shutting him out.

But there's a little girl inside of me who remembers that he once built her a dollhouse. That he took me to a Daddy Daughter dance for Valentines Day. That he let me hold the steering wheel when I was six. That he would toss me into the air when I was four - and he would always catch me. Because he was my Dad, and he'd never let me get hurt.

I'm staring at this mugshot and I hate it because it doesn't look like the Dad I had when I was a little girl. And I hate it even more because I can see myself in there somewhere. I have his nose, his mouth, his chin, his eyes. I can't even see my mother in my reflection anymore.

I've been listening to this song all day long . . . music helps calm my soul.





I'm still not sure what I wanted out of this post. It's not pity. Can't take that. Hell, maybe prayers. Prayers that I can just deal with this and move on. Prayers that he'll be that one minority that turns his life around. Prayers that even if he doesn't my little brothers don't have to deal with this the same way I've had to.