It went from good in my childhood, to alright/meh in my teens and now it’s non-existent. My mother and I moved across the country when I was 7, and he could have followed. In fact, it would have been better for him financially to have followed. But with that great distance, and the occasional visit on the holidays, there wasn’t really any opportunity for us to build a relationship.

He blamed my mom on several occasions for our lackluster relationship, waded into a family matter he had no right getting into, and grew increasingly right wing and religious in my late teens. I just kind of cut the line at 19 and I stopped taking his quarterly call to me. I know he loved me, but you can’t build a father son relationship off of gifts and seeing each other for a week out of every other year. That coupled with our great disparity on core values and beliefs, kind of sealed things up there.