What Moving Forward Looks Like

When I was 7 or 8, my parents took our family to Disneyland. I was in a store along Disneyland Main Street with my father, and he bought me my first wristwatch. It had Snow White’s Castle in the middle, and Micky and Donald on each side. The watch was too big, so my dad pulled out his pocket knife (this was the 80s, so clearly pocket knives were allowed at Disneyland), and gave it a new hole so it would fit my wrist. Then he put it on me and playfully ruffled my hair. I remember feeling this incredible surge of love that my dad trusted me with something as valuable as a watch.

A couple years after that moment my dad left. I didn’t know it then, but he was struggling with a pretty nasty addiction to pain killers, and over the next decade he would be in and out of jail, and my life. He would later die when I was 19.