My luck with men has never been particularly good.

Perhaps more accurately stated, my ability to procure and maintain long-term, meaningful, romantic relationships with the male species has been what many would call unskilled, untamed, and just plain unfortunate.

If one were to sit down and psychoanalyze my romantic failings, any shrink worth his salt or his $250 an hour, would easily deduce that my trouble most certainly stems from my youth, where like many I endured much of my childhood without the presence my biological father playing any kind of significant role.

My early memories of my father are strewn with addiction, compulsion, psychosis, and on rare occasions, violence. That’s not to say I don’t have a few pleasant recollections sandwiched in between the heaps of shit. The day I caught my first catfish out of a small lake in Jackson, Tennessee is one of the better ones. And the tradition my father Jimmy and I had of driving through city alleys, making up stories and singing songs as we downed sugary jelly beans has yet to escape my adult memory.

Unfortunately, after year five or six of my life, memories of my father grow decidedly darker. Despite my mother’s most unselfish assertions that my father at one time was a “good” person, little in my mind or memories can confirm this.

He was an alcoholic, a drug addict, unfaithful to my mother, and he downright terrified me most of the time. To this day, my nightly dreams are cluttered with his most ominous faults.

The short ten years I knew him ended one snowy December Friday night when he simply failed to pick me up for our weekend visit. And that was that.

He fled, we think, or I was told, to escape mandatory child support payments. But the real reasons may never be completely understood. One thing can be sure, when the most significant man in your life leaves you when you’re still in training wheels, the men who come after will almost always be assured a rough go of it.

My mother remarried when I was eight-years-old to a kind man. But he was a man who represented nothing to me at that young age but competition for my mother’s heart. It certainly didn’t help things when I had a degenerate father whispering in my ear, “He’s not your Dad K***, he never will be, and don’t you fucking forget it.” So I’m sure, you can imagine, my childish heart strings were pulled in a plethora of uncomfortable, miserable directions. This man, D*** didn’t stand a chance in hell.

Despite consummate counseling sessions involving our new nuclear family, recommendations from all manner of child psychologists and so-called family relationship experts on how to properly assume his new role, he could do no right in my eyes.

I was unbelievably jealous and conflicted, but to this day, it seems like a weak excuse for how I treated D*** in the early years. Being a child of divorce teaches you a few things, the one I cultivated to an almost perfect science was my ability to manipulate my mother into a constant game of “who she loves more.” I knew, in the end, I’d always win out, but after you’re abandoned by one parent, testing the other for consistent loyalty becomes common practice.

I was, without mixing words, downright nasty to D***.  Door slams and snide remarks, silent treatments, tattling to my mother about every failing I could pick out in his 6′2 frame. I made his life, what I can only assume, fucking hell. Retribution for my mother’s insistence, she deserved to love again. Afterall, in a child’s naive eyes, I should have been enough for her. We were partners, living and struggling together, relying only on the certainty of each other to get through the days. Then she had the gall to want something besides a child’s love to sustain her.

I may never know exactly where my contempt for D***  stemmed from, but the hate I aimed his way may never fully be reconciled in either of our brains. And the regret I have for the way I treated him, haunts me to this day.

He tried so hard. Attention, gifts, pink platitudes. Anything I wanted I could have talked that man into. Worldwide tours of ice cream and teddy bears and he would have complied. He never missed a school play or concert or Hallmark holiday. He endured years of tantrums and torture and he never ran away. I alienated him to a degree that few could ever comprehend. He was, clearly, terrified of me. Whatever he said, whatever move he made, I found a way to criticize, sour his solicitations, dampen his dearest deeds.

After a while, as I grew older and held the standard contempt every teenager does for their parents, their keepers; the distance between us as human beings widened even more. The years he endured with my mother, of my eating disorders, substandard struggles, and mental illness, would have sunk the best of men. But somehow, for some reason, he stayed. It was something I never fully understood. If I were him, I would have gone running for the hills, never to look back at the woman he loved and her offensive offspring.

On a July day when I was seventeen, returning home from my summer tennis drills, my mother sat me down and told me she had something to tell me. I could have never anticipated what came out of her mouth next. My biological father, had been found dead from a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head.

I cried and screamed and pushed my mother away at the sound of the news.

And for a time after that, I grew angry. I had always imagined at some point my father would reenter my life. And now that dreamy reunion I imagined countless times in my young mind, was dashed. He would miss every part of me growing up. My high school graduation, my college years, me falling in love for the first time, my wedding day. He’d never walk me down the aisle.

I prided myself in not crying at his funeral, where the majority of attendees didn’t even know I was his daughter.

I resented implicitly that I wasn’t enough to keep him from pulling that trigger. At what point, if any, did I enter his mind in those last moments and remind him he had at least one thing to live for?

Now, years later, the more mature me, understands that there are moments and depths of sadness and hurt we can’t always be pulled out of.

The last memory of Jimmy, was me placing flowers on his casket, my mother talking my hand, squeezing it tight as could be, and walking away, forever severed and changed.

It’s hard to live through some the things I did and not come out the other side worse for wear when it comes to healthy relationships with the opposite sex.

My stepfather, D*** is a shy, modest man, but in him lives, perhaps, the kindest soul I’ve encountered in my 32 years.

He loves to play golf.

Meatloaf.

And imbibes occasionally with a Brandy Old Fashioned.

He has a tendency to make up his own versions of popular songs, often replacing the protagonist’s name with that of their Airedale Terrior, and almost always to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.”

He leaves newspaper smudged fingerprints on every door in the house.

He has a penchant for numbers and to my chagrin, conservative talk radio.

He flips his tie over his shoulder whenever soup is served.

And he has a voracious appetite for sports of any kind.

He just recently purchased a cell phone but almost never turns it on.

He drives in a succeeding pattern of gas on, gas off, gas on, gass off, that has caused me to upchuck in his car more often than I like to admit.

His jokes are, well, limited in scope, but he never fails to be the first to rumble in laughter at them.

He writes my mother an original poem every birthday, anniversary, and Valentine’s Day.

And he calls her “baby.”

He worked his ass off for the same company for over 30 years.

He tends to his mother the way all children should.

And, up until just a few years ago, when I moved to DC, he always responded “no problem” whenever I told him I loved him.

He’s endured the phenomenon that is my mother and I for countless, faithful, selfless years. No easy task, let me tell you. We are a tenacious, caustic, high-maintenance pair that few would ever choose to reckon with, albeit love.

Whenever he reads an article in a newspaper or magazine he thinks one of us will find interest in, he cuts it out in a perfect rectangle and lays it on our pillow or next to our keys, or our favorite countertop in the house.

He loves the Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra.

He complies with every late night Dairy Queen or Good and Plenty request my mother and I have ever made.

And he has a collection of polo shirts that would elicit envy from Ralph Lauren himself.

He studied Latin.

He never had any children of his own.

He is tall and balding and handsome.

He asks me to bend the the brims of all his baseball caps.

And waits for me to come home (months at a time) to reset every clock in the house that ticks an hour ahead or tocks an hour behind because of Daylight’s Savings Time.

He’s been referred to by me by his first name for the full 25 years I’ve known him.

And despite introducing him as my “Dad” to casual acquintances and suitors alike, I’ve never once addressed him that way.

So maybe, now, decades later, and 800 miles away, it’s about time I refer to him by the title he has rightfully earned.

The father who has propped me up when I needed, and carried me when I needed even more.

The father who loved my mother without precedent or pretense.

The father who told me today he would teach me how to play golf when I head home in August.

The father who digs me out of self-imposed ditches.

And cleans up my messes without ridicule or resentment.

The father who made up for all the original one’s failures, and then some.

The father who walked me down the aisle on my wedding day.

I guess what I’m trying to say is.

Thanks Dad.

No problem.

I love you too.

“Well I’ve lost all the other bets I made…you’re my lucky day.” -Bruce Springsteen