Shattered Snow Globe - Part 4

This is where a lot of detail becomes fuzzy.

Having a car allowed me the luxury of escape. And during that escape I remember smoking weed, using a fake ID to frequent the bar scene, paying the street people to purchase us cases of beer and wine coolers, and eating mushrooms a time or two. It was party time!

I still fought with my stepfather, but not with the same frequency or intensity of my earlier years. Part of it was because I wasn't around and the other part was because time does alter things.

Maybe it was all my friends and boyfriends telling me what a great guy Bill was or maybe it was that my extended family all liked him. It may have even been the fact that my mom was actually happy for once in her life. I don't know. But slowly over the course of the next few years, things just evolved.

During these years, my relationship with my real father became strained. Due to his absence from my childhood, the two of us simply could not relate to one another at all. To him it was all about success and that was measured by wealth. I also was forever the little 7 year old that he used to take flying occasionally. He remarried during this time too. His wife was a real piece of work and perfect for him. She didn't care much for me and the feeling was mutual, which I'm sure added to the relationship severing. The main crux was that he made a lot of promises he didn't keep and over the years, the letdowns mounted. I eventually just phased him out altogether.

With Bill, success took on a different meaning. It was more about experience and relationships. And as I slowly gravitated away from my father and his philosophy on life, I found myself orbiting more of Bill's interests and caring more about what he thought. I cared more about people in general too.

There were actually times I enjoyed being around Bill. He was an easy-going, country bumpkin and just plain fun. I was finding it more and more difficult to hate him, though I would try.

I'd spend my mornings eating breakfast at the kitchen table watching him play solitaire. We had some good chats during that time. He was interested in what I was doing and what I thought. Sure we still had our disagreements, but they were not anything out of what one would consider normal. Not to mention that the volume of these discussions was much softer.

I will forever credit him with my love of Penn State and football in general. Game weekends were a real blast at our house and the tailgates when we attended games, were even better.

I was slowly realizing that Bill gave a shit about me. You know, like a parent is supposed to.

He cried at my college graduation ceremony. Of course if you commented about it, he'd just tell you he had something in his eye. And when I left home to move here to Georgia, he was real torn up about it and insisted that I would move back home in a year. Well, I'm still here some sixteen years later.

In thinking about where I was and where I am now, my life before Bill existed inside that snow globe. It was my own little world. Sure it could be shaken up every now and then, but I was protected inside that glass bubble. The snow would always settle to the ground eventually. Yeah, Bill smashed that thing to pieces all those years ago and I hated him for it. It sure wasn't easy to clean up the mess.

I'm unable to pinpoint the exact moment in time that things changed, but they did indeed change. For all intensive purposes, Bill became my father. He is my father. And I do care about him very much.

So when I recently received the news that his cancer is terminal, a wave of emotion washed over me. And like the ocean's tides, my emotions on the subject of him leaving me ebb and flow. I'm just not ready to let him go yet.

Lucky for me I don't have to.

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