28 Jun Why I Am Glad I Grew up without a Dad

When Father’s Day rolled around once more, my timeline was awash with pictures of my friends and their dads. Father’s Day is a weird day for me and many others like me. I grew up without a dad in my life, not because of a tragedy, but because that’s what he chose.

You see a lot of statistics about boys who grow up without dads. They mostly revolve around how we will descend into a life of crime or how, without a male role model, we won’t understand how to respect women. To be quite honest, it winds me up. More children are growing up without a father than ever before and the majority of them, like me, turn out fine.

My dad left my life when I was around a year old and I have no recollection of ever living with him. In the years that followed, I would see him sporadically, and those times that I did weren’t the happiest times of my life. Being an alcoholic, evenings were spent listening to him ramble on about the injustices life had given him and how no one respected him in the way he felt he deserved to be respected. He went off to form a new family and had two daughters with his new partner and that spelled the beginning of the end of my relationship with him. Now, I don’t even know where he is or what he does.

But I don’t regret not having a dad. In fact, I’m glad I grew up without one. Not having a father has taught me a lot about what I want to be and about how I want to treat my children. I was also fortunate to grow up with a mum who had enough love to cover two parental units.

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