One of the blessings that I can count is my ability to speak English… I know
it’s something not everybody can say they do, especially in a Third World
country, and I’m aware of that.
I’m also aware that is thanks to my father whom plant the seed in me
since I can remember (maybe even before that). Telling me little words and
phrases that taught me to love the language and keep improving.
Unfortunately, and I always say this, that’s the only good thing he left
me… and those that know my history know it. It’s not badmouthing, or “revenge”,
or … I don’t know … anger (even though many sees it that way). It’s the truth. The
ugly truth.
Is not just that he abandoned me… like the thousands stories of fathers
around the world walking away from their kids. It was the humiliations, the slights,
the abuse, the rejections, putting his wife’s daughter before his own daughter.
The yelling, the threats, the hits to the doors of the flat.
Not wanting to give a single penny to absolutely anything (for me), not
even to pay the hospitalizations at the clinics for the asthma attacks that he
caused me. Pulling me out of his insurance when I was 13 years old. Saying that
he was gonna pick me up on Sundays and not showing up; or lying and say he was
sick, and later on people would come and tell us that he was at the park with
his wife and her kid.
Telling my mum that he would give her “three shits” when she asked him
my alimony. To literally send me “to hell” when I was 26 years old. Telling me
that he didn’t give a shit what I and my mum did. And I’m just summarizing the
important points.
It’s hard to believe in men when the one that’s supposed to take care of
you and protect you, starts telling you when you’re 12 to “stop eating”…
I started to see on Twitter that Kelly Clarkson’s performance in
American Idol had been very emotional and made everybody cry. A song dedicated
to her husband and based on her history with her dad.
I knew that it was going to hit me hard and remove my past, because of
another of her songs from one of her early productions (“Because of you”)… I delayed
watching it as much as I could. When I saw the video, my heart wasn’t entirely
on it. I didn’t pay the attention it required.
Until I sat down and heard it. And, man, it hit a cord… obviously from
the moment I heard the first line, I had a lump in my throat.
I can understand how emotional she got while she was performing, even
more by being pregnant… because every time I hear the song I cry, too.
That song is the photograph of my history… and gives me faith that I,
like her, will find a good man that can love me and will mend the hole in my
heart that my dad left.
Thank you, Kelly…
