My stepfather and me...
We don't really see eye to eye most of the time. Usually a control freak of the worst sort, he at one point scolded me and my fellow siblings for putting a block of cheese in the wrong location in the fridge.

Now, I'm very much incapable of dealing with authority. The boss I work under has never once tried to boss me around. The day he does is the day I walk out, and I never made it a secret to anyone.

So, as you can imagine, my stepdad's tendency to 'ask' things in a way not utilizing question marks, often leads to, as I'll call them, tensions. Meaning that I have, over the years, insulted him, cursed him, and threatened him in every way I could think of. In his eyes, I must've been a complete and utter cunt, and in my eyes, I deserved to rot away in a tiny secluded spot in hell.

Yet, despite my completely unjustified outbursts, he has never put me aside, never turned me down when I asked for a favour, and never treated me the same way I treated him. But above all else, there is one thing that has earned him my deepest respect:

A few years ago, when I was still a teenager (a title I outgrew only one year ago) me and my girlfriend for two years (first proper relationship for me, and also the last one to date) broke up. Two years might not be much to some, to me, it was everything. And to someone whose mental department wasn't operating at 100% stability (us young'uns, as you know, can be overly emotional at the best - and worst of times), this was a huge blow. My life was over, and I wasn't to fully recover in a few months.

So it came to be that my stepdad found me sitting in front of the tv at 4 am on a particularly bad night. I was watching a programme I found remotely interesting, which was as good as it got for me, until he walked over to the set and turned it off.
The arse turned off the tv, before walking into the kitchen. Without any reason. Wile I was watching!

I snapped.

For the better part of half an hour, I screamed my lungs out at him, threw a few bits of furniture around, and somewhere down the middle, started crying like the angsty emo kid everyone becomes at one point in time. I yelled at him to fuck off, to die, to fuck off and die quickly, before I'd crush his breathing system with my own hands, all the while trembling like a horny teenage rabbit on Red Bull. After I lost my voice and nearly choked on my own tears, my stepdad, the cold and emotionless cunt, having said not a single word during the entire scene, calmly as ever walked back into the kitchen...

And came out with two bottles of beer. I was incapacitated. What the hell was going on, why was he offering me a beer instead of punching me over the moon and into China?

I never found out how he knew about my state of mind at the time, nor did I discover how he knew that single insignificant action would push me over the edge, but what I do know is that I have never felt the sense of relief I did afterwards. My stepfather set himself up as a sacrificial goat, a bulls-eye target for me to aim every last bit of my cropped-up anger and pain towards.

I called into school ill for a full week afterwards, lacking the physical strength to participate. That night drained me, both emotionally, and physically, but my depression, which had been building up over the course of 5 long years, vanished.

We still fight, I still curse at him every so often, but looking back on things, it appears he might have been the single person to prevent a teenage Obsidian from doing a twisted impression of a christmas ball dangling from a tree.

The nicest thing someone has ever done for me? Saved my life, and very much improved it by doing so.

Warning: Huge wall of text incom... Oh. Never mind.

Sorry for length, girth, color and texture. I didn't know it's not supposed to look like that.
(Obsidian, Fri 3 Oct 2008, 14:33, 3 replies)

That't the thing about control freaks
They can have hidden depths, and when they surface the whole world can suddenly seem different.

*click*
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Sat 4 Oct 2008, 3:21, closed)

Wonder
That's... just great. Really great. Deserves a click.
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Sat 4 Oct 2008, 20:24, closed)

You're very very lucky.
I fell out with my own dad in a similar way and he just disowned me. Didn't even speak to me on my wedding day. Yes, I was a cock, but everyone is at some time. You're lucky to have someone who can see that and knows you can be a better person.
(robbersdog, Tue 7 Oct 2008, 19:14, closed)