In order for me to tell you about my relationship with my father, I must first tell you about how I came to be. My mother was born and raised in Michigan; While my father was born and raised in Mississippi. Two different people brought up in two different places. But through the marriage and migration of my grandparents my mother ended up in Mississippi. While my mother was living in Mississippi her and my father met and fell in love and in December of 1997 I was conceived.

On September 13^th, 1998 at North Mississippi Medical Center my mother gave birth to a girl and named her Darrian Moneé Walker. A month later my mother moved back home to Michigan, removing herself from a not so good relationship. I guess maybe the news of my expected arrival changed my father’s perspective on my mother and their relationship because he didn’t protest when she took his newborn daughter 797.8 miles away. He never even asked her to visit so he could see his one and only daughter. Looking back on it now that infuriates me. I don’t understand how a parent could help bring a life into the world and just not want to have anything to do with her. Fortunately, I had an abundance of uncles and my mother’s biological father who treated my sister and me like princesses. In a way my father's physical absence did not bother me as a child, I rarely ever noticed his absence.

When I was five my mother decided she was tired of snow and wanted to move somewhere it “never snowed” but that didn’t mean Mississippi. She set her sights on Atlanta Georgia, so for a school year my sister and I stayed with our grandparents in the same town as my father and his family while my mother got set up in Georgia.

September 13^th, 2004. My sixth birthday, also what I remember as the first time I would meet my father and my earliest memory of him. (Of course I had met him before, at the hospital when I was born and a few other times that I couldn’t remember because I was so young and only knew about because of pictures of us together.) I had talked to my father on the phone and he told me he was going to take me and some of my cousins and my sister to McDonalds Playhouse for a birthday party, so all day I sat and waited for him. He never showed. At about 8 my grandparents called us to the front of the house one by one, I was last. I remember walking down the hall and seeing nothing but darkness and as I reached the dining room the lights came on and my mom's family yelled surprise. They knew. I'm not sure how they did but they knew he wouldn't show and that's my earliest memory of my father.

All my life I’ve dwelled on that memory. That one event has shaped my relationship with my father as a whole. I always have a wall up when it comes to him because I don’t fully trust him, it's sad but I don’t. I’ve had twelve birthdays since 2004 out of those twelve years I could count the number of times he has called me to tell me happy birthday on one hand. There have been times where my mom or older sister have had to call him and tell him that it was my birthday because he just doesn't care, if he did no one would have to tell him. Even this year my stepmother had to tell him that my 18^th birthday was coming up.

It's always on my mind when I talk to my father to tell him how I really feel. But, I don’t feel like I know him enough to open up like I can with my mother’s family. My senior year I lived in the same town as my father so I thought our relationship would get better but it didn’t. There was one incident where I asked him for money because senior year you want to do a lot of fun things to celebrate your high school career and the cost shouldn’t have all been on my mother. My father works in construction and travels a lot so when I asked him for money he said he would be in town soon and he would bring it to me then. A week passed and I knew there was no way he could possibly still be in town so I repeatedly called until I just gave up. So my older sister sent him a text, he responded by calling me. He told me that he couldn’t do things on my time, and didn’t have to do what I said and he would give me the money when he could. We got off the phone and I vented to my sister saying things to her that I don’t feel safe enough to say to him. My sister texted him again. He called me yelling telling me that my sister was putting things in my head and causing problems in our relationship, and I still can't fathom how he could even begin to think, there weren't already many problems between us. But I could never say that to him.

I’ve always wished that I had a relationship with my father where we talked regularly and I was comfortable enough to call him dad and not cringe when he tells me he loves me because at times I truly don’t believe he loves me. It's very sad but true. My whole life he’s done the bare minimum which is pay $88 a month in child support and that hurts me. Am I only worth $88 to him? Is that really all? And then I see the relationship he has with my brother and sister who live with him and his wife and it just makes me wonder, are they better than me? Why do they deserve a dad as opposed to the eighty-eight dollars a month that I get. I feel rejection when it comes to him and some nights I ask myself why I’m not good enough for him and why he didn’t want to be a part of my life from the very beginning, and why I don’t deserve a dad who loves me and shows me unconditionally that he does.

I’m not going to let my relationship with my father ruin me. I’m going to school, I’m going to Medical School and I will graduate and become a Orthopedic Surgeon and show him that even though he rarely showed me love I succeeded. And I’m going to be so successful that he’s going to beg me to be in my life and get to know me because of the person I’m going to become.I want him to regret every time he ever made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. I’m not saying he is a horrible person he just isn’t a good father. He does try sometimes and periodically does things that make me feel like he may be trying to be better but he always reverts back to his old ways. Some people should be parents and some shouldn’t and I feel like my father shouldn’t have become a parent when it comes to me.