Fuck me right?

Having kids was the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. Prior to becoming a father I was an angry, angst filled piece. I didn’t care about anything or anyone and I was dangerous to everyone involved with me. I was so caught up with the past, a childhood best left forgotten, that I was just pissed. I was pissed about the beatings. I was pissed that nobody ever did anything to try and stop them or to try and look out for me. I was pissed about the way that I felt I was treated by 90% of the people I had come into contact with. I was just pissed. I wanted to set the world on fire. I wanted to bulldoze the rainforest’s and pave them so nothing could grow back. I wanted to chain the doors of churches and old people home’s and throw firebombs through the windows. I wanted to club baby seals and drowned pillow cases full of kittens. I wanted the world to feel the helplessness that was all I’d ever known. I wanted them to feel alone and cold and worthless, feelings I’d been born with. I didn’t know love, or hope, or security. I only knew anger and fear and the fear left me feeling weak so I changed it to anger as well. Basically I just knew rage. I craved death, I had no hope for tomorrow, no excitement for a future that as I saw it was ugly and cruel and bleak. By the time my first daughter was born I’d already been addicted to numerous drugs, things like heroin and meth, booze, cocaine. I’d already been locked up more times then I care to remember. My reputation was already fucked. During my chicks pregnancy I continued to party, she didn’t, she sobered up, but I just kept on raging. I was convinced that God was gonna let the pregnancy go full term and then kill both my girl and the baby during labor. I even told the doctor that when he fucked it up, I was going to kill him and every single person in the hospital. Everyone. And I would have. But then she was born. And as she started crying and I realized that she was gonna be ok, the Jason that I’d been for 25 years up to that point, well, he died. Dead like he’d never been there in the first place. And in his place was something new. Something that was completely alien to me, something that felt completely different, that thought completely different. It’s one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had in all my life. Like a light switch being turned on and off. On the day that my oldest daughter Brooklyn was born, so in turn was I. It was amazing, and magical, and beautiful. It’s by far the best feeling I’ve ever had. In seconds I knew things I’d never known. I was so happy, so excited, so proud. I no longer craved death, no longer dreaded tomorrow, in fact I couldn’t wait for it. For the first time in 25 years I wasn’t filled with angst. For the first time I knew peace. I no longer asked myself why because I knew. All the pain, the struggles, the misery, it had all been building me up for this and for the first time in 25 years I knew exactly what it had all been for, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. I can still feel the magic I felt that day, I can still feel the hope and the pride. But they feel differently now then they did then, they feel tainted, they feel bittersweet. They feel dreamed. Those first 4 years of being a father were the best days of my life. I honestly believe that that Jason was the purest version of me that will ever be. That was the closest I will ever get to being a “good man”. I miss that Jason, I mourn him all the time. Brooklyn mom bailed on us about a year after we’d gotten married. I seen it coming from a mile away and when she called me to tell me she’d cheated on me and wasn’t coming home I wasn’t surprised. When I told her that if she tried to take my daughter I would chop her fucking head off, she said, “I’m not trying to take your daughter.” And again I wasn’t surprised. Since the day Brooklyn was born, Jessica just didn’t seem to be into it. I thought she just didn’t want to be a mom. She was young and I figured she wasn’t done being young and having the baby would stop her from being able to be young, so she didn’t want to be a mom. I now think differently. I am no Dr Phil but I now think that Jessica had postpartum depression and that in my excitement to be a father I completely missed it. Fuck I didn’t even know what postpartum depression was. When Brooklyn’s mom expressed interest in finally being Brooklyn’s mom I welcomed her back no problem. I had come to realize that there was going to be things that I would never be able to teach my daughter, things like being a girl, and so I was thankful for Jessica finally wanting to be a mom. Our family was destroyed but at least it wouldn’t be completely wrecked for my daughter. When she started going with her mom for extended periods of time, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I had so fully invested myself into being a father that I had no idea what to do with myself when she was gone. So about 30 minutes after my daughter would leave I would be on my way to the liquor store and an hour later I’d be drunk. I’m a miserable drunk. I suck at it. I like to say I’m allergic to alcohol, I break out in handcuffs and fresh charges. Of all the addictions that I’ve had, alcohol is by far the worst. It has cost me the most, it has destroyed the most, and it was the hardest for me to walk away from. I still have moments where I want to drink. The day that I “overdosed” and dhs took my kid, her mom was on her way from Texas to pick her up. She was gonna be gone for a whole month, I was gonna miss her birthday. I had tried to argue this to Jessica but she didn’t give a fuck, she told me that if I didn’t want to miss her birthday then I had better hitchhike down to Texas so I wouldn’t miss it. I was emotionally fucked. I am emotionally fucked. Brooklyn is was and always will be my very favorite person on the planet, and on the last day that I thought was gonna be with her for a month, and which turned out to be forever, on that day, instead of taking her to the park and enjoying the time that I had left with her, instead I ran as far as I could from the feelings and emotions I was experiencing and I got drunk. Then as a fail safe, I ate a handful of Xanax. When the cops showed up and told me that they were gonna take my kid, I naturally tried to fight them but with all the booze and Xanax in my system my heart had different plans and so I had a heart attack. I was dead for 3 minutes. When I woke up I was in jail which is where I learned that they had taken my daughter to foster care and that I was being charged with child abuse for putting my daughter in an unsafe environment. I had been wasted the day before. All day my mm had been trying to get me to let her take Brooklyn with her, I told her to fuck off. Right before I went to the homies house where eventually the cops would show up to do a random home inspection, I had been trying to cook my daughter some food and I had set the fucking wall on fire. I had a moment of clarity and realized I was wasted and that I was probably gonna burn the place down so I bundled Brooklyn up cause it was snowing, and barely dressed myself, I carried her over to my friends house. When the cops showed up she was sitting on the couch eating Mac and cheese and watching SpongeBob. She wasn’t in an unsafe environment, she was in the safest environment I had available. Doesn’t matter. Once the system got involved I was fucked. The way they looked at it, because they didn’t know me at all, all they knew about me was what was written on my criminal record, but they way they saw it, there was no way I could be a good father. There was no way that my daughter was safe and protected and loved and in my opinion, in the very best environment that she could be in. No way were they going to let me continue on with my happily ever after, foster care would be much better for my daughter. Living with strangers who had no feelings towards my daughter one way or the other would be better then her living with her criminal father, a place she’d been living all her life. When I got out of jail I did everything that dhs asked me to do. I hitchhiked 80 miles round trip twice a week to have 1 hour of supervised visits with my daughter. I enrolled in the classes they asked me to enroll in. I took the lie detector test they asked me to take. I went to all their court dates and put up with all their judgemental bullshit treatment all the way until they sent me to jail and then to prison. While in prison they determined that due to the fact that I wasn’t complying with their treatment plan, (aka not going to their court dates) it was best for everybody involved if they terminated my parental rights. I figured fuck dhs, who cares what they said cause I’d thought that Jessica would always let me be in Brooklyn’s life as long as I wasn’t a danger to her or something like that. I was wrong. I got a visit from my sister and that’s when I realized that shit had gotten fucked. That they terminated my rights and that Jessica was going to be a piece of shit about this whole thing. That’s the day that that pure Jason, the one that was closest to being a good man died. I buried his ass that night on a lonely Colorado prison yard. What replaced him was close to what he had replaced but worse. Uglier and more bitter. Angier and more angst filled, possibly a little evil. Anyways, this shit is getting long winded, since that day I’ve died and been reborn a few more times. The Jason I currently am, a mixture of all the Jason’s before him, not as ugly as the Jason born after Brooklyn was lost, but nowhere near as beautiful as the Jason that was born when Brooklyn was born. I had another child with another chick that I knew was no good, a beautiful daughter named Hayden who surprise, surprise I also have nothing to do with, not by my choice. I’ve been to prison 2 more times for a total of 3. I revisited old addictions and haven’t had a lot of sobriety and again I crave death, once again dreading tomorrow and feeling helpless, cold and alone. More depressed and angry then I ever was as a child.. The reason I say that having children is the best and worst thing I’ve ever done is because my children are awesome. They are smart and beautiful and magical, capable of anything they will change the world. But I won’t be there to see it. Never having known the love that I have for my children, I wouldn’t know how badly I miss them. I wouldn’t know the failure that I know from failing them. I wouldn’t know a thousand ugly things that I now know. And I wouldn’t feel the helplessness that is a thousand times stronger then the helplessness that I felt as a child. But fuck me right?