Flatulentbadger

Never mind, I'm good!

N/A

This is going to be a wall of text, but the only way to tell it is from the beginning, so if you have a minute, help a sky brother out. I got married at 19 and had a lousy year long marriage that ended with the death of our unborn son. Shortly after our divorce I joined the navy, started jumping in Monterey Bay in '04 and was drinking my pain away when I met another woman and we dated for 6 months before she got pregnant. I realize now that I had shut that part of myself off from the hurt and was too afraid of losing something to even try to hold onto it. So shortly after he was born, I transferred commands and made no effort to see them. Not a deadbeat yet, but completely absent from his life. After my active service was up I went back to where my relatives were in Arkansas. My son's mom and he had moved there. I still made no effort to connect with them and she eventually gave up and moved back to her family in Lemoore, CA. Not long after she moved she was killed in a car crash. That was 7 years ago and I haven't been able to skydive since then. If I am ever going to jump again I have to take care of my son first. After her death I realized what I had thrown away and was diagnosed with crohns disease soon after she died. After 4 years, several hospitalizations for physical and psychological reasons and a lawyer, I got on disability and spent the next 2 years wasting away having given up on life. The start of the turn around was my own father who was always there, but still a lousy dad, getting prostate cancer, undergoing a radical laparoscopic prostatectomy and still not being free of cancer. He said afterword, had he known what life would be like after the surgery, he would rather have just died. It was my attempt to reconcile with him over the next year while I was helping him recover and taking care of him while I was just as sick that I realized I didn't want my son to suffer a poor relationship with his dad like I had. I was determined to leave and 2 weeks before his 10th birthday I contacted his maternal grandmother who had been raising him and told her I was buying a bus ticket to California. I spent my last $200 and arrived in Lemoore last Tuesday. So, I'm a reforming deadbeat dad. I will always regret the way I acted for the last decade, most of my life for that matter, but the only way to have any hope was to finally start living for him. Which brings me to the reason for posting this. I can't move in with them because the house is full and they're household income is already stretched thin just taking care of themselves. Beside the fact that I have no right to ask them for anything after my behavior over the last 10 years. His grandma has been incredible in that she wants us to have a relationship and has welcomed me into his life. So, I'm homeless, spending as much time as I can with him, trying to find some permanent place close by that my disability will let me afford. If anyone knows of a spare room in the Lemoore/Hanford area, all I have is a seabag full of clothes and my laptop so I don't take up much space. I just need to find a way to get on my feet, so I can start helping their household out and be there for my son. I'm not going back to the way I was after meeting him and I'll never leave again, but a safe place to stay would make this easier. That's the story so far. I'm turning things around and I have faith that something will come along, but it can't hurt to put myself out there and use every resource I can think of. So if you don't know of anything, or you just think I'm scum because of my past, remember how lucky you are to be able to embrace the sky. Blue skies, brothers and sisters!

This is really late, but I've been out of the loop for a while and I just found out about these guys... It bummed me out until I talked about it with the internet. =D I know there are an endless supply of stories about the ones we've lost. So, tell some... A Reddit link