The Day I Saw My Father in the Mirror

 

-by Ryan

You ever have one of those moments where everything just... stops?

Like the air in the room gets sucked out, the noise goes mute, and all you can hear is the sound of your own heart cracking open?

Yeah, that was me—sitting on the prison phone tonight, talking to my wife. And just when I thought the conversation couldn’t get any heavier, she hit me with it.

Her voice was soft, but serious—dead honest in only the way she can be.
"Baby… no joke… I paused the interrogation video from the night we got arrested—and do you want to know what I saw in your face in that moment? I saw your dad."

Boom.

Just like that, my world shattered.

Because that—right there—is the one man I swore I’d never become. The one reflection I prayed I'd never cast. But when she said it, I knew exactly what she meant. I felt it. Deep.

I was high as hell in that video. I don’t even recognize the man she was looking at—paranoid, twitchy, soulless eyes, face tight and vacant. A shell of myself. Gone.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She was just being real. And the truth? It crushed me.

Because I knew.

I knew I had become the very thing I feared the most. The one example of “husband” and “father” I had growing up—and it was all wrong.

My parents didn’t love each other; they survived each other. Fists, glass bottles, screaming, cheating, choking each other out. That was marriage to me. That was “love.”

So when I met her—my wife—I didn’t know what to do with it. I was terrified I wasn’t enough. That I couldn’t love her right. That I’d fail her, just like I’d seen over and over in my life. So what did I do?

I ran.

Right back to the only coping skill I ever learned: meth.

And when meth wasn’t numbing enough, I stacked it. Meth turned into meth and fentanyl. Then meth, fentanyl, and PCP. Then heroin. Then Xanax. If it could shut me up inside, I took it. Anything to stop feeling.

And once again—just like clockwork—who was there to feed it all?

My dad.

The same man who swore he loved me but handed me poison every time I needed comfort. The same man who shot me up for the first time at 13 and never once stopped to think about what that did to my soul.

So when she said those words to me tonight over the phone—“I see your dad”—it wasn’t just a statement.

It was a wake-up call. A gut-punch. A mirror I couldn’t smash.

It destroyed me.

But you know what else it did?

It shook something loose in me. Something real. Something I’ve been too afraid to face for a long-ass time.

Because the truth is, she didn't say that to hurt me. She said it to SAVE me.

She’s not just my wife. She’s my truth-teller. My lifeline. My one shot at real love.

And instead of running from that truth tonight—I’m choosing to run toward it.

Because I’m done being a legacy of pain.
I’m done being a man made in the image of trauma.

I’m building something new now.

Not the man my father was.

The man she believes I can be.

So yeah... that phone call tonight? It broke me. But it also rebuilt me.

And I’m holding onto that.

Brick by brick.