If you’ve read anything prior to this, you already know a little about my relationship with my parents.
Most of my memories with my dad feel loud, bright, and fun. On the surface, everything looked fine—carefree even. But when I slow those memories down, I can see how thin the line really was. One mile per hour faster, one more second with his attention on the radio, one more moment with no hands on the wheel while opening a bottle—and I wouldn’t be here to write this.
Dad always made sure I was physically taken care of before he started drinking. If we went to the bar, I had a soda, a bag of chips, and coins for the bowling machine. I stayed busy, talked to people, wandered when I wanted. On warm days, I swam at the beach while he stayed up at the bar, sometimes watching me from the balcony before heading back inside.
I was rarely alone. Everywhere we went, someone kept an eye on me like I was their own kid. If I needed help, an adult was always nearby. To a child, that felt like safety. What I didn’t understand until much later was how often that safety depended on strangers and circumstance rather than the person responsible for me. I didn’t see the risk because the environment felt familiar—and familiarity can masquerade as protection.
With my mom, the absence wasn’t physical—it was emotional. My earliest memories of her carry a constant tension, a feeling that connection between us was unpredictable. I learned quickly to read her moods, to shape myself around them. Her emotions mattered. Mine felt optional.
When my sister, Amber, walked into a room, everything shifted. She didn’t have to earn attention—it came naturally. I watched, compared, and quietly measured myself against a standard I could never reach. I wanted approval so badly that I learned to shrink, adapt, and try harder instead of asking why love felt conditional.
With my dad, I felt emotionally chosen but physically unprotected.
With my mom, I felt physically present but emotionally unseen.
I didn’t know then that both kinds of absence could exist at the same time—or that growing up inside that contradiction would shape the way I understood love, safety, and my own worth.
This was the beginning of a pattern—one that would shape how I attached, what I tolerated, and how I learned to survive relationships.
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