Oh well, I might as well add my "confession" in the estranged dad category, though rationally it's really nothing I personally did wrong. I just kind of feel like I have.
My dad used to occasionally hit me, frequently threaten me, and almost constantly was verbally abusive, usually when he was drunk, which was every day, but often even when he was sober. Long story short, he abandoned the family, which was sort of a mixed bag in that we at least got rid of the source of the abuse, but it really left us in dire straights financially, especially with my mom being disabled and unable to work around the same time. I had to fill the monetary gap while also paying for college, which was extremely hard.
My two middle sisters still care for him, because while they often got yelled at, they weren't the target of the physical violence like I was (and whenever he would go after them I would always step in), and there were some good years in there before he lost his defense job where he wasn't drunk all the time. He never showed any care or concern for the youngest at all, and left while she was still very young, so she's mostly indifferent to him.
Many years later, one of my sisters (the eldest after me) moved to Las Vegas because of the relative ease and expediency of getting a teaching job there as opposed to California. My dad also lived in Vegas, so we were worried at the time that he might try and move in with her. Lo and behold, after losing one of dozens of jobs he couldn't hold onto for more than a few months at a time because they didn't care for their employees to be drunk at work, he lost his apartment and asked to move in with her. She accepted in spite of our misgivings.
In the span of the eight months or so he lived there, he managed to pick fights with the neighbors, get her house broken in to by another neighbor who he apparently owed money to for buying him booze, threatened suicide, took her car without permission and drove drunk, and sold some of her valuables to a pawn shop for liquor money. Clearly, and all around winner. She wanted him out of there earlier, as did we, but she decided to wait until her lease was up and just move to a different place without him.
So, for some reason, he felt the job propects would be better up in Reno, Nevada, so we paid for bus fair up there. I didn't really give a shit, as I was just happy to have him out of my sister's life for her safety and since I felt helpless being unable to be there immediately whenever she would call with a problem.
He was living in a shelter until he could get a job, but the shelter kicked him out for being drunk and disruptive. He had now hit the proverbial rock bottom of living homeless on the street, and still didn't give a damn about quitting drinking in spite of how it had destroyed his life and his relationship to his family.
The kicker is, and the reason this is sort of a confessional for me, is that even after all that he has done, all the chances we've given him, all the times we've tried to get him in a rehab program, I still feel guilty because he's homeless, like I haven't done enough to help him. WTF is that? It doesn't help that a few of the aunts and uncles (not most fortunately) on his side have gotten on our case for "leaving him to die" either, completely forgetting that he left us and not the other way around, and that we've told him that having a relationship with us is conditional on him stopping drinking, but he doesn't care.
I know I've probably done all I can, and after the way he's treated all of us I probably shouldn't care, but it still hurts because I feel as if I've let him down in a weird, completely irrational way. The human mind sucks.
Sorry to be a downer, and usually I don't go into personal details much, but it's cathartic to get these things off your chest every once in a while.
