My Failures As A Father: Final Chapter

HOME

My mom wanted to keep my daughter.

Not forever, of course, but the judge didn’t confirm custody until August, which didn’t leave me much time to move out of my mom’s house and register Krystasia into school. Thankfully, I’d been searching for apartments months before that. I knew I wasn’t ready to sign any lease, but I was figuring out which area would be best for my daughter and I to start our new life together. I thought I was preparing myself, but when those custody papers came in the mail, it opened a vault of pressure I’d never felt. 

“She can always stay with me until you figure things out, son.” Of course my mother would say that. And for a second, I accepted her safety net. I registered Krystasia in Woodbridge College, a high school down the street from my mother’s home. Looking back at it now, I didn’t trust myself yet. There was part of me that didn’t feel ready to take my daughter on. Registering her at that school was letting fear dictate my decisions. It was me saying that I didn’t want to mess this up and the safest way to do that was to keep you close to my mother. 

Then I woke up. 

“We’re not staying here.” It was late August when I said that out loud to my mother. “No matter what, we’re moving.” 

She didn’t even try to convince me otherwise. 

The first thing I had to do was find somewhere for us to live. In that month alone, I’d seen at least a dozen different places. Condos, apartments, spaces on top of stores, basement apartments, houses where I would have the main floor. None of them felt right, but time was running out. Then I came across an apartment in Parkdale and decided it was good enough. The price made sense, it had two bedrooms and the apartment was larger than any I had seen up until that point. 

I paid the $500 deposit on the spot.

But then my stomach felt sick. At first, I thought it was excitement, but I knew what that felt like and that wasn’t it. When I left the landlord’s office, my heart started pounding through my chest. I had trouble breathing and actually had to stop walking. People were passing me by in the middle of the sidewalk where I was curled over like I was about to vomit.

It’s like my body knew before I did. My subconscious saw the grime in the hallways and the stains on the walls that I had somehow closed my eyes to. On the sidewalk, though, it still wasn’t clear. I knew something was wrong, but I also knew I had to find somewhere for my daughter and I to live and this would have to do. 

All of my fears were confirmed on the day we moved in. First, the move was delayed by a month because they didn’t have the apartment ready. That was the first red flag. I had registered Krystasia to Humberside, which was a school in High Park known for its academics. When the apartment wasn’t ready for September like it was supposed to be, I had to drive my daughter back and forth from Woodbridge every morning and afternoon. 

It was mid-October when we finally moved in. An older man saw me unloading the moving van at the rear of the building. 

“Run,” he said. “You don’t want to live here. Everyone here is trying to get out, you don’t want to be moving in.” 

I should’ve put everything back on the van and drove back to Woodbridge. My heart sank because I knew he was right, but I couldn’t turn back now. I needed this to work. More than anything I’d ever done, I needed this to work. 

Nothing about that apartment worked, though. The first time Krystasia saw a roach was on the shower curtain. Then we noticed them in all of the cupboards. I told the building manager and they sprayed the apartment, which meant we had to remove all of our stuff. 

It didn’t work. 

Then the bedbugs started. Krystasia woke up every morning with a new bite. Two on her stomach, others on her arm. I made off-handed jokes to mask my embarrassment, but when Krystasia escaped to her grandmother’s house every single weekend, I’d cover my face with the couch pillow and scream and scream till my throat got sore.

That was only the first month.

By month two, nothing got better. Not the bedbugs, not the roaches, not Krystasia staying on weekends. On a Saturday morning when I was alone, a mouse scurried from under the couch. I jumped back into the seat and yelled, not because the mouse scared me, but because I’d had enough. I fucked up. There was no running from that anymore. This place couldn’t be our home. Before Christmas, we were gone. We barely lasted two months. 

I was able to sublease the apartment to someone else and Krystasia and I were back at my mother’s. You’d think that I was angry. That I would let this failure beat me down. Maybe I felt like that for like a day, but failure was not an option, so I set out to find a new place for us. A new home. And with the energy I was putting into the world — not fear, not concern, just a feeling of self-confidence I hadn’t experienced before — things didn’t take long to materialize. 

My dream location was a neighbourhood called Queen West so that’s the only place I looked for apartments. There was one building in particular that I’d been going to every month for over a year. They had a waiting list but I didn’t care. Every time the landlord saw me, she’d smile and pull back her bright red hair and say, “nothing yet, sweety.” But I was determined and when I went to see her again that December, she knew I wouldn’t stop until I was living in one of those apartments. 

“There’s nothing open now, but one of my tenants told me he’s moving. It has two bedrooms but it won’t be ready until February. Do you want to see it?” 

The apartment was on the 17th floor and as soon as she opened the door, I knew it would be our home. When I stepped out on the balcony and saw the view, I was even more sure. 

“What do I have to do to get it?” 

I paid the first deposit on the spot and we scheduled a February 3 move-in date where she said I could pay the second half of the deposit. 

Krystasia didn’t see the apartment until the first day we moved in. She went straight to her room and looked out the window. 

“Wow,” she said. And damn did it feel good to hear her say that. If it wasn’t clear before, I realized in that moment how much of what I did was all for her. I needed my daughter to love that apartment. I needed her to tell me I did a good job and that she wanted to paint her room a soft pink and wanted a white dresser. Her enthusiasm was like a drug being injected into my veins. It was a high I wanted to feel with every decision that I made for us. Just us. For our home.

Getting that apartment took care of one problem, now we had to deal with school.

It’s not like Krystasia wasn’t doing well. After the first semester, she was still getting all 80s and 90s. When I went to parent/teacher’s night, all of them said she was bright and didn’t have any problems with the work, but that she was quiet. That observation didn’t bother me, but I knew something wasn’t all the way right. 

The month or so we were at my mother’s house before we moved into our new apartment, I had to pick Krystasia up from school. I started noticing that she always came out on her own. She didn’t wave bye to anyone or wasn’t ever with a small group of friends when I pulled up to the front. I didn’t want to panic.

It would take time for her to adjust and I knew that. This was her first year of high school in a new area she didn’t grow up in. That meant none of the kids entering grade nine were her friends. And understanding that my daughter wasn’t the type of person to walk up to someone and start a conversation, I still thought maybe she’d be OK. Just give it some time.  

But it was January and things weren’t getting any better.

“Where did you eat lunch today?”

“In front of my locker.”

“alone?”

She nodded her head without looking at me.

The end of that first school year made me take a step back. My daughter was there when her mother and I were fighting outside of the middle school. She was there when her mother walked her out of her home and into my car and told her that she would never see her or her family again.

That included Krystasia’s two sisters. The oldest one was five or six when my daughter and I moved out on our own. Krystasia had already bathed her sister, wiped her sister’s face after she ate, scolded her for being in her room. Her sister followed her to the convenience store down the street from her mom’s place and fell asleep on Krystasia’s shoulder too many times to count. All of that was taken away without warning and I hadn’t done anything to help my daughter face that. 

What could’ve been going on in her mind?

For one full year, she never heard a word from her mother. For one full year, she became an only child. Her life had changed much more sharply than mine and she was only 14. The trauma of those events had to be with her somewhere.

Abandoned.

Lonely.

Confused.

I wasn’t sure how to broach any conversations. I’d let Krystasia know that she could invite her sisters over to our new place any time. I’d tell her that she could call her mom whenever she wanted. 

I’d make those statements from time to time and she’d shrug or say, “I know, Daddy.” 

But I never pushed it. I never asked her the questions I wanted to. Her and I were so happy together. Just the two of us. We’d eat at different restaurants along Queen street, take the streetcar to the Sony Centre to watch Fall for Dance, belly-laugh at the movies we’d watch on almost a nightly basis. Krystasia didn’t seem phased by any of the chaos caused by me and her mother. It actually looked like she was thriving. Why would I interrupt that with any probing questions? 

Yet there she was, a year into high school without a single friend. No one she could call to go to Dufferin Mall. No one she could text to meet at High Park. It was always just us.

Maybe she wasn’t coping so well. 

That’s why I decided that she needed to transfer. Krystasia was against it at first and I understood why. Even though she had no friends, the thought of starting over again, of entering a new school with new people and teachers and a new bus route must’ve been frightening. She just did all of this a year ago. Why would I put her through more change so soon?

It took a while for me to convince her, but my gut told me that I was doing the right thing. I had done my research on schools around the area. I wanted a school that was arts-focused but not academically competitive. There needed to be real people at this school who lived real lives outside of chasing grades. I settled on a Catholic school about a twenty-minute commute from our apartment. 

She started that September. After the first week, she already made friends.

Suddenly, my daughter was going to Billie Eilish concerts with Maryam or staying after school to watch ball games with Geena. I heard her laughing on the phone in her bedroom and making plans for the weekend.

I remember thinking that as a parent, it was one of those rare times where I got to see the outcome of one of my decisions. I did something right. And I know that sounds silly because I’d been a parent for fourteen years, but seeing her adjust felt monumental for me.

We were finally home. And I don’t mean just physically in a place. We were each other’s apartment, each other’s roof, each other’s security. We both had the key to the other’s heart and we knew it. We felt it.

Home.

All my failures and guilt and disappointment were slowly fading. My fear from the moment I left on that Greyhound was a distant memory. My own insecurities ignited by my father had vanished.

Home.

We made it. We’re making it every single day. My failures as a father fully replaced by the joy of being my daughter’s parent. Our journey has led us here with a future that we’re ready to take on together.

My daughter.

Me.

Home.