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No Matter What He Did For Me, I Still Can't Call Him My "Father"

( words)
*For representational purpose only.

I was just 13 years old when I first saw my parents fighting with each other. I wasn’t aware of the reason behind the chaos, then. One day when I came back from school, I found my mom sitting in the corner and crying.

I asked her what had happened, and she said that my father had hit her because she refused to have sex with him.

My mom is a fair, simple and beautiful lady and my father is just the opposite, he is so dark. We stayed in a joint family and all the expenses of the house were initially taken care of my grandfather, and then by my father's younger brother, my uncle.

My father doesn’t do anything to earn a livelihood. I don't know how my grandmother took this decision that my father could marry anyone, without being financially independent.

I have one brother and my uncle takes care of every one of us, financially. My father is good for nothing. My mother fell in love with my uncle. Everyone wants a perfect life partner who looks after them and makes them happy, so I don’t blame her. My father found out about this. Usually, he is okay with my uncle taking care of everything but the day he found out about their affair, he went to every relative and told them about it.

He didn’t care about our future. Our life changed that day. After all the drama, my mother divorced him. But as it was not a legal divorce (they did it through the panchayat), some people acknowledge it and some don’t. My mother stayed on to live with my uncle and I love him more than my own dad because he sacrificed a lot, for our sake. He could have left us to be with his brother, but he didn’t. Now I have everything but I don’t know why I cannot seem to call him dad.

I really want to call him 'dad', because if he would have let go of our hands then we would be sleeping on the road today and my mom and I would be working as maids.

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