Today, my
dad is the best dad I could ask for. He’s a loving
husband to my mom (always making her laugh), he’s been to
every one of my soccer games since I was 5 (I’m 17
now), and he provides for our family as a construction foreman.
This morning when I was searching through my dad’s
toolbox for a pliers, I found a dirty folded up paper at
the bottom. It was an old journal entry in my
dad’s handwriting dated exactly one month before the day
I was born. It reads, “I am eighteen years old, an
alcoholic who is failing out of college, a past cutter, and a
child abuse victim with a criminal record of auto theft.
And next month, ‘teen father’ will be added to the
list. But I swear I will make things right for my little girl.
I will be the dad I never had.” And I don’t
know how he did it, but he did it.
Not mine.
