Le sigh

A friend of mine just emailed me to tell me how much money my dad makes. The gov't publishes a list of public servants who make over $100,000 per year. I knew he made 6 figures, but I didn't know the exact number until now. Judging by what she said, by the time he retires in maybe 5 years, he will probably be making a quarter of a million dollars a year.

Back when I was a kid missing meals sometimes, he must have been making even more money than I thought. Those bad times are in the past, and yet now the old wound is open again. Argh!

God, thinking back to my childhood when I would see him a couple of times a year and it seemed to me that he was always moving into a bigger house, or driving a new car, or sporting a tan from yet another vacation... meanwhile, I tried to spare my mom from paying income taxes on the paltry $400 per month that he had been paying in child support for me (the amount never changed in 10 years) by asking him to pay it to me directly... and he clawed it back to $250 because he couldn't get a tax break on it anymore. At that time, I can now estimate that he was making over $160,000.

Le sigh.

Last year he claimed that he may have seemed rich at that time, but he wasn't because he had debts and whatnot. Well, that may be so, but he worked really hard to look rich, and I told him it's not my fault I believed his fiction. Now I have to wonder whether it was even a fiction, as he claimed.