I got out of the hospital yesterday evening, thankfully. I was planning to leave anyway, because I don’t particularly like to spend this day… well, conscious. Of course, I am always conscious. But the point is, I’ve yet to spend this date in a good mood or around anyone other than people I am forced to be around — which, as always, is my immediate family.

December 22, 1987, my father died. No one knows if it was a suicide or not. I’ve heard different reasons behind his stupid actions, and I’m inclined to believe suicide now. But it’s hard to even think about it because nothing I thought growing up was true about this.

He was overseas in Italy when it happened. He’d been at an Army Christmas party in the base he was stationed at overseas. He’d been drinking…not really a surprise. But he drove. And he drove without wearing a seat belt…apparently my father always wore his seat belt. My mother said this was the first time she knew he hadn’t worn it, and it killed him.

I loathe drunk drivers. I won’t speak to anyone who’s driven drunk. I hate drunk drivers.

So, to an extent, I hate my father. Which I think I do anyway, but I can’t decide.

It took me a good 17 years to find out the truth. Maybe 18, I can’t remember. But the truth came in the form of a message on myspace. What a hell of a way to get your life flipped upside down.

I was raised as an only child, and I knew my father had 1 marriage before marrying my mother, and had a daughter from that marriage. But I’d never met them and I didn’t really care to. I was fine that way.

My second or third year in college, only a few years ago, I got a message on myspace from a girl named [my sister]. It didn’t say much other than asking me if “[my father’s name] was my father.” I responded with what was an essentially “Yeah, but who the hell are you?” message. She wrote back saying that her name was [her name] and that he was her father too, and that she’d been looking for me for years — and a whole lot of other things.

This led to a confrontation with my mother, needless to say. A huge confrontation and a lot of yelling. My mother confirmed what [my sister] was saying — which was that I wasn’t an only child after all, and my father’s previous marriage hadn’t been his first by far.

My father had had two children by two different women before his first marriage. In his first marriage, he had two children. They stayed married a while, but he got divorced and then met [my sister’s] mother. They never married, but had her, my sister. He then married the women before my mother, and had a child with her. They were divorced quickly, and he married my mother. My mother lost (stillborn) her first daughter, and then I came along.

Everything I thought or knew about my father was gone after that conversation. My mother told me she hadn’t known until after he died about all this — because of the names on his social security support or something. He’d lied to her, all along. When my mother got his possessions, she found letters from my father to another woman… he’d been cheating on my mother too.

My mother tells me he loved me, though.

I don’t believe it.

I grew up thinking he’d just been an idiot who drank and drove. My sister has been obsessed with trying to find us all, and she got in contact with his sister, I think. His sister said a conversation with him before he died made her think it was suicide, that he was apologizing for everything he’d done.

Maybe it was, I don’t know. I don’t care.

I hate today, and I hate Christmas. And I’m pretty sure I absolutely HATE my father.

Merry Christmas?