Deserving Better

You loved seeing Dad coach first base because he’d shown zero interest in your weekend baseball games, until this season, when the crisp sunny mornings at the field were stunning, like the team manager’s young wife in tight skirts and blouses, who couldn’t have birthed a teammate. I watched him stand close as they talked, saw her hand brush his shoulder as he glanced at me, but I focused on the scorebook and suppressed the denials and forgiveness. We were down big the day your manager pushed between them and landed a punch that transformed a decade of torment into exhilaration as Dad’s face bled across the blue jay on his jersey—he left that night.

The hearings were ugly, but I won full custody based on his DUIs and a chair he tossed across my lawyer’s table, and later, after he apologized to just you with more lies, my anger shattered anything rational, so I went anti-vax, calculating that beyond a costly divorce, vaccination was the sharpest weapon I owned to penetrate an expert on pediatric infectious disease. Blogging it all diminished his reputation and canceled invitations to lecture on viral outbreak prevention. I knew the risks, and this was supposed to end him, not you.