My father

My father has always been a big problem in my life since the day I was born- the reason my mother left him was because he never held a job down and had 11 W2s the first year they were married, and always came up with an excuse to never step up and take responsibility for anything he has ever done, and whenever issues would arise he could never man up and deal with it- he would always end everything with packing up and moving and going to different states. My father was always a drifter all over the east coast when he was a teenager and I to his adult hood he settled down for a little bit in virginia beach and met my mother who was living with her brother out there. They get married, they have a child, and they settle down in Norfolk for a little bit where my dad has a decent job working for a security company and to get out of it, he quit with some story about how he was attacked by a wild animals somewhere in the bushes at Busch Gardens- my mother showed me the records and she told me straight up that she knows for a fact the cuts on his face were self inflicted because of how precise and neat they looked- and if a wild animal had really attacked him in the face like he said, his face would have been mutilated and the cuts would have been jagged. After all that was said and done, he decides he wants to move out to Texas and from there they ended up having to move from Texas to Tennessee where they had me. I wasn't even a month old yet when he decided he wanted to pack up and move to Oklahoma, and then suddenly, mom said no sooner after we would be settled down and after my little brother was born he was trying to convince her to move out to New Mexico and follow one of his cross dressing friends. My dad was abusive to her in the process if all this instability and cause her two miscarriages, And he would turn around and tell my older brother that it was okay that mom lost the babies she did because they weren't his. Mom and dad had fights a lot concerning me because I was having problems functioning and developing like a normal toddler. And if I did anything bad he would let me get away with it and threaten to beat the crap out of her if she disciplined me- in a previous post about my family you will read that they were saying I was retarded ( and this was the big reason why they were saying I was retarded because my dad wasn't helping me properly develop intellectually like he should have) and he would literally try to tell my mom I was epileptic when all I was doing was throwing a fit. Out of fear of what might happen with all of us, my mom finally put her foot down and divorced him after several marriage counseling sessions- The counselor even told her to divorce him because he wasn't willing to admit any faults on his end of the marriage,do mainly out of fear. That he would have me on disability for the rest of my life, she divorced him and sent him packing. Over the years stuff has happened and went down while my parents were split up. There were two different occasions where dad has been in trouble for kicking my moms car in and again mom showed me valid proof. Under his supervision, I was almost killed and fell from a moving vehicle and managed to survive it. Under his supervision, he sent my older brother down the stairs at get my little brothers bottle and my little brother and him were playing on the step so. The way down- my little brother tripped and fell down the whole flight and was bruised up a little and nothing broken, and my dad flipped out on my older brother and started saying it would be his fault if he never gets to see us again- all I hear in the room is, my dad screaming at him, and then as plain as the day was, he beat the shit out of my older brother so bad that half his face was bruised from the eye socket down to his neck, and then a restraining order was put on him. After a while, I would remember my parents fighting and arguing about child support non-stop and I remember there were multiple times where my dad wasn't around and in my life because he was just never stable, and could never keep a job. And when he was around in my life he would physically abuse me and mentally abuse me. He would literally make me stare in a mirror in front of me and call myself fat and ugly if I asked for something to eat. If I woke him up from his 18 hour sleep, he would beat my ass. It would always seem to me that he would always find a reason to beat me for no reason, and he would go on about my mother nonstop, or he would bring up the fact that they thought I was retarded and call me that and make me feel really horrible about myself. I am 25 now and I have been finding out a lot of things about my dad to the point where I wish I never even met him or knew him because of what emotional distress all this stuff causes me. But jog only have I found out stuff about my dad through my mom, but I got a letter in the mail one year about how I was owed 2700 dollars by social security because I was underpaid by them. I didn't even know I was getting a social security check and when I got angry about it because I thought for a minute there my mom was using my problem to my advantage, I find out that when my father would always bitch and complain about my mom telling everyone he doesn't pay child support, I suddenly started catching onto what was going on. My brothers and I were getting a ssi check because our dad was on ssi around the time. Apparently my dad had been off and on ssi for so long he used that as a loop hole to not pay us any child support when nothing was wrong with him and he was perfectly capable of working. He would always bitch if he had to give anything money wise to my mom because he claimed she would use it on herself instead of us, which wasn't true. He just didn't want to help her out with us because she divorced him, so he used that loop hole and made us suffer for so many years because he was trying to get back at mom. Every time he remarried another woman, income to go to us and things to go to us would come out of their pockets instead of his. We even supported him when he went to school to be a nurse and waited around on him to get his shit together by the time I was fourteen, and guess what? He didn't do shit for us after he got his nursing license. He married a woman with no kids and because she doesn't know what it's like to be a parent, she is very selfish and doesn't know how to sacrifice anything as a parent (and I'm sorry but if you marry someone with kids you need to understand that kids come before anything) but dad seized that as an opportunity to start blaming her for why he hasn't stepped up yet again to help us with anything. I mean he would promise us that he would be able to help us more when he got his nursing license. What happened when he got it? He sent my step mom to school and bought her everything she needed for school supplies but when it concerned us, he only got me paper and a pencil and when I started school, hip got griped out by my teachers for not being prepared. If he had to buy me any clothes for school he would flip out on me. When he knew I was barely eating at my moms house because my mom was struggling really bad, he wouldn't help me with food. When he got his big ass tax return for claiming us, he didn't even ask us if we needed anything but instead took him and his wife on a cruise to Mexico. He would blow all his money on musical instruments that they don't use, go through cars left and right, buy clothes they don't even wear, buy all kinds of luxury food and toiletries, and get so much junk that they hoard a lot of it in other rooms. He hasn't one called and asked if we needed anything. We are all adults but still any parent who wants their kids to succeed in life will do what it takes to help them get through it and when he sees how bad I have been struggling with eating and me losing my job, and helping me out, he lies to me and tells me he doesn't have money, and says that all the money is his wife's, but he turns around and says he doesn't put his women before us when I know it is a lie because his wife has told me she is selfish because her parents used to pick random people up off the road and help them out she would always have to sacrifice her things and her room to help them. So everytime she has to help people she turns into a hateful and greedy bitch, and my dad allows her to be like that and doesn't say, "hey those are my kids" nothing. He just lets her act that way and uses her as an excuse to not help us out, and he turns around and calls my brother to ask him and he's done it to me before by asking us for large amounts of money that we have to work so hard to make to begin with and only a fraction of that shows up every pay day on our checks. I find a mandolin in the back seat if his car and come to find out he paid almost 900 dollars for it, after turning around and asking me for 150 and after asking my brother for 400 dollars. My point is he is always coming around and asking us for financial help but if we need it from him because him and his wife both make a hell of a lot more money than any of us do, he never wants to help us and always finds an excuse or a loophole to not help us just like he was when we were kids but completely denies that he does it and acts like he is father of the year. Am I being irrational? Am I wrong for being so angry at him for this? There have been several times where I haven't talked to him for years because of all of this and he still doesn't get it. Does anyone else see the fucked up things in this or am I just being too touchy? I mean this is really making me upset and I know talking to him about it isn't going to do me any good because be doesn't listen and believes what he wants to. I am in a predicament where I have to rely on him for transportation to get around, and even though he has helped my brothers get a drivers license I still don't have one and he's always coming up with an excuSe to not help me and telling me he doesn't have money for gas to do it even though he has money to get everything he wants and then some. But it's always a factor that I have to pay him back to be a parent to me and help me out with the things he should have already done for me. I hate not talking to him but he doesn't get it, and he never has, I'm just to the point where I don't know what to do about any of this, I have no other way to get the help that I need and every time I need him he's always shady about helping me. What would any of you do in my predicament? Am I being too upset about this?

You have every right to be angry at your father. Every right to hate him even. He deserves it. But you don't deserve it. You shouldn't let yourself live with such negative emotions within you. I'm not saying you should forgive him for all the pain he has caused. But that is a tainted past. And you can't change the past. But you can prepare for your future. Your father will never be the loving father figure he should have been. You need to let go of any expectations of that. Try to build a new foundation for a relationship. Try to let the past stay there and work on building some sort of positive relationship with your father. If it doesn't work, then at least you tried. And then I'd cut him out of your life.