How I Learned to Stop Blaming Others
And realized who was really responsible
My parents divorced when I was fifteen years old. It was not an amicable divorce or anything near that. My father was mentally and emotionally abusive to my mother, me and my siblings. He had been injured at work, more of a mental injury than physical, but refused to accept disability. He thought he could get more from filing a lawsuit against the company where he had been employed.
But he never bothered to file that lawsuit.
Instead, we lived on a small, paid under the table, income he made working part-time at a gas station his friend owned. We moved into an old farmhouse one of his relatives owned. No one had lived there for several years and the house had not been well maintained.
The house only had a fireplace and wood stove for heat but there were several sections, three feet or so diameter, of a large sycamore tree laying in the yard. That would be our heat. But he refused to rent a log splitter, claimed he was afraid I might hurt myself with it. He said I could use steel wedges and a sledgehammer to split the sections and then an axe to chop and split it into firewood. I was not stupid and knew that would be far more dangerous than a power splitter.
