License Plate BBD

We use to have an old Chevy Suburban. It's license plate started with the letters BBD. One day, in our driveway, we were looking at it and trying to give words to the letters. We settled on "Big Bad Dad".

My dad liked that idea, but decades later, I don't lend much positivity to that thought. It makes me think of how the way my father lived his life made him into the Big Bad Dad, or rather, the Big Bad Wolf in my life.

Dad huffed and he puffed his way through my life, and he blew the home that my brother, mother, and I lived in to the ground. None of us wanted anything to do with the house where I was raised because there were too many sad memories there.

I followed Caleb into the Army which took us to Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and finally New Mexico. My mother created her life again in San Antonio. My brother moved with his wife across the United States as she worked as a traveling nurse.

Four years ago, when I was living in Kansas, and Mom and Jason were living in Texas, Jason told me that he wished we had a relationship. I did, too. We tried to have a phone relationship from that point forward. However, there was always a bittersweetness to it, because it didn't seem like it would ever be more than that.

Caleb, I, and our children were our family. Then, two years ago, we were blessed with Caleb's parents moving three miles away from us. The following year, my mother and step-father moved directly across the street from them. In July, my brother and his family moved into the same city as us.

I didn't think I'd ever be able to have the familial bonds so strong again and I feel truly blessed to have all this love and joy in our lives.