Ten years later, my mom asked my older brother and me to take our cat to a friend’s farm and shoot him. Are children whose parents can pay their bills put in that situation?
At times, it's like two positive ends of magnets pushing each other apart as they try to come together.
When I was a child, I identified with Luke Skywalker like thousands of other children. Unlike many of those kids, it wasn’t just because Luke was the brave, young hero. I sought out meaning from Luke Skywalker, because to my mind, both our fathers were evil. His father of course was Darth Vader, enemy to the Rebel Alliance and master of the Dark Side of the Force. My father was Joseph Lepczyk, a man who killed himself when I was six-years-old. Joe financially and emotionally scarred our family to the point where we never really recovered.
It's taken the death of my mom to realize that our childhoods belong to our parents.
"Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right."…