Daddy's Little Girl

Dear Journal,
I hate when this time of year rolls around. I hate it more than anything else in the world. It's the beginning of the professional hockey season. Which is one giant, ongoing reminder of my father. Yay............

Mom makes me see my psychiatrist more often around this time of year, by request of my psychiatrist herself. I think the whole thing is bogus, but my mom says she's worried about me. I've never given her a reason to be worried. Unless you count my downright hatred for my father and my desire to pound his face into the ice a reason to worry. And everyone does.

I do this whole psychiatrist thing to make my mom feel better. She gave up her entire world for me, so I would do anything for her. Even if it means keeping this incredibly pointless journal that Dr. Vivian told me I should do. Apparently it's so I can express how I feel and shit; even the stuff I don't like to talk about aloud. We'll see how well this goes.

So let's talk about why today was a particularly bad day. It was the home opener for the NHL team, the Carolina Hurricanes, so a bunch of my friends got together to watch at my house. I didn't want to watch because the game was against to Toronto Maple Leafs, but I didn't want things to be weird and cause my friends to question. So I let them come over just like they have for all the other Hurricanes game for the past three years of high school; the fourth year wasn't about to be any different.

It's not like they knew I didn't want to watch it anyway. They didn't know that my father was the coach of the Maple Leafs. Or that he used to play for them. Or that, before playing in Toronto, he played here in Raleigh, North Carolina for the Hurricanes. Or that he left my mom and I behind so he could do all of that. Why should my friends know that hockey was always more important than family to my father? They just do not need to know all of that.

I hate seeing him on TV. Because how often do you see someone you know on TV? And you'd usually get really excited and make a big deal about it and make jokes about how they're famous now. But I don't really know that man and I'm not excited to see him on TV and it absolutely kills me that he's famous. I don't want to make it a big deal, but as much as I hate to admit it, it is. I mean, he's the Jeff Skinner, of course he's a big deal. That man has ruined so much for me, and he doesn't even know me.

I get a simple "happy birthday" phone call and a really expensive present every year, but that isn't knowing me. He doesn't know that my favorite color is red or that I sing along with the radio as loud as I can when I'm driving alone. He doesn't know me just like I don't know him. And that hurts.

That brings us to right now. I'm sitting in my room, in the dark, writing this by cell phone light because I don't want my mom to know I'm still awake. She will walk in to remind me that I should get some sleep because I have school in the morning, but find me sitting and crying in bed instead. And she'll know exactly what it's about too; she knows what tonight was. She knows that having my father in town is the worst thing for me. He won't come visit me because my mom tells him it would just set me off and there was a good chance I would start throwing things at him. But what she doesn't know is that it upsets me more that he's never around.

I can trace back my hatred for my father to when I was in the first grade. Or summer after first grade, I guess. I was at summer camp and it was Father's Day. All the boys' and girls' fathers would come to camp with them and spend the whole day there. But I didn't have a father. My 'Uncle' Eric would come spend the day with me. He wasn't even my real uncle, just my mom's best friend for forever. I hated that I never had a father to come to camp with me. Seeing all the other little girls with their fathers and how they treated their little girls like princesses killed me inside.

All I have ever wanted, was to be a daddy's little girl.

But it's not like anyone knows that.