My New Stepbrother.

When I was younger, my mom and dad seemed so in love, but then one day my mother told me that she was leaving.

It all went downhill from there. The moment my mom sent the papers. The moment my dad cried for maybe the first time in his life. I remember coming home one day and saw him wiping his eyes as he read the papers. He then slammed them on the table and left out the house. When he came back, it was 2 a.m. and he was drunk. He broke a few things around the house and then passed out on the couch. After that, it was a thing for him.

They argued all the time but I never thought it would come to this. I thought they would try to work it out because they had me. But I could see how unhappy my mother was with the both of us. So she left.

His drinking was a problem for a while, he didn't get better until he started his AA meetings, recommended by a few fellow officers. That's when he met a woman named Kelly. She helped him come out of the drunken state and to start over. I had never met her before, but I've seen multiple pictures of her. She was a doctor. Tall, brunette with amazingly blue eyes. Dad told me she had a son who was in my grade.

Everyone always asked me, why your dad, why not move in with your mom? Well, if you met my mom, you'd understand why dad was the best choice out of both. Even drunk, my father paid more attention to me than my mother ever did. She neglected me a lot. All the important events, dad showed up but mom had something that was a little more important than me. Even on my birthday, mom had the day off but she chose to go into work anyways. As I grew older, I realized now it wasn't because of me, it was because of my father. Either way, I resented her for it and she knew that. That's why she never insisted that I move in with her, and even if she did, I would've said no.

It's not that I hated her, I was 10 when she left, and I didn't even understand why she was leaving. I never understood how she could willingly leave her only daughter because she was unhappy with my dad. She was the first person to ever break my heart. After she left, I became dependent on my father, and in his drunken state, he became dependent on me.

It was hard being 10 and trying to take care of yourself and your father. I remember one day, when he passed out on the couch, as I was pulling the blanket over him, he whispered how sorry he was and that he doesn't mean to be a burden. He just wanted the pain to end. That night was the first night I cried myself to sleep.

As he started to get better, I started to get worse. His pain reflected to me and it had finally hit me that my mother was gone. She hadn't attempted to make contact with me and as the days went by, I got worse. My dad tried therapy. It helped a little, but I was still sad. One day, I came home from school and heard him talking on the phone. 2 days later, I got a letter from my mother explaining that she loved me. I took the fact that my father went to the source of his problem to help me, and I used it to get better.

I'm happier now. But every now and then, I'll still feel the pain, or I'll see my father cry. And it breaks my heart.