Harder than losing my dad
Photo of the day #6
April 2, 2012
Random photo from my collection.
When this photo was randomly chosen, I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to skip it. But I want there to be some guidelines for the project, and I wanted to be genuine in not skipping, in order to show an authentic passage of time. My hard drive of photography is intermingled with personal photos also taken by my camera. So either I need to move thousands of photos around and spend countless hours curating my photography in order to show everyone the photos that I want to show, or no skipsies. I decided to give myself the allowance to edit this photo so that I could still talk about it. Not to mention, I don’t have permission from the people in the photo to share it anyway. So that is why the faces are blurred.
From the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2012, I lived in an apartment with my then-boyfriend and his friend. The three in the photo are my ex, our friend, and our neighbor.
Memories from those times are sensitive and, at times, traumatic. After dating my boyfriend for nearly six months, I learned from our roommate’s girlfriend he was doing a particular drug. This was someone that I thought I would one day marry. I was shocked. Blindsided. Frozen. I was making nachos in the kitchen when she told me. She told me she had found his “stuff.” Later, I approached him about it. I don’t remember, but he probably denied it first. It was the first of many, many lies. From the very beginning, I tried to figure out how to navigate the addiction with him. I always told him that I just needed the truth. I was ready to do whatever was necessary to help him and have him get help. But I could not deal with the lies and the gaslighting. Ultimately, it led to me not being able to believe him if he said he was going to the grocery store. I questioned everything he did and said.
I went to a Naranon meeting to seek support and figure out how I could get through it. What ended up happening was the opposite. The lead speaker that night told a story of how she finally realized she couldn’t change her husband and that he was going to march to the tune of his own drums. That she had to change her expectations of him. In that moment, I realized we had no kids together, we weren’t married–I could walk away from this right now. Why should I change my expectations of a partner? Could I imagine a future where we had children, and I had to explain to them that their dad isn’t around right now because he’s in rehab (again)? That was not the life my parents sacrificed so much for. From there, it became easy. I knew what I wanted, but I just had to wait to get it.
When our lease ended, I moved back home. We tried to stay friends at first, but I decided I didn’t want that.
My Dad had just died from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s) in 2010. In the midst of it all, I remember thinking to myself that losing my dad when I was 21 years old was the hardest thing I’d ever dealt with and that this, now, had become the hardest thing I ever had to get through.