I don't know if John ended up the way he did because of nature or nurture. Maybe both. Either way, it felt like he was set up for failure from a young age. I've asked myself a hundred times if John became who he was because of his blood or because of his scars. Maybe it doesn't matter. He never wanted healing. He wanted a hostage.
Disclaimer: I'm not sharing this part of the story to make excuses for his actions, past or present. This isn't about redemption or justification. It's about showing that people are complicated. Their choices have roots. Their reasons are tangled. But tangled reasons don't excuse abuse, neglect, or just being a shifty human being.
His biological father? He was a piece of work.
John's biological father had somewhere between nine and thirteen children. Nine they knew about. When he died, thirteen different children filed for Social Security benefits.
He died when John was five.
Most of the women he had children with were teenagers, sixteen to eighteen years old. He was in his mid-twenties to his thirties. At least six women, likely more. Multiple baby mamas pregnant at once.
I'll let you, dear reader, label that how you will. I know exactly what I'd call it.
His first wife was sixteen when she got pregnant. They had three daughters together. But before the third was even born, he had a fourth daughter with another sixteen-year-old. That child was born two months after his third.
A couple of years later, he met Kay. But while he was with her, he cheated again, another woman, another pregnancy. John's sister was born just four months after he was. Let that math sink in.
Then came another girl. Sixteen again. He was twenty-six. He married her, not out of love, but to avoid legal consequences. They had a boy. She later accused him of assaulting her during postpartum. She fled, moved in with her parents, and had another son just eight months later.
His final girlfriend gave birth to one last daughter. She was two years old when he died.
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John lived with his mother, Kay, and his sister, Daphne. Technically, he was Kay's fifth child.
Kay had her first three children by the time she was eighteen, twin boy and girl, then another son, all within a year. They lived in a trailer.
One day, she stepped out to borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbor. While she was gone, the trailer caught fire.
By the time she returned, it was too late. The fire chief investigated and ruled it an accident. Something had been stuffed into an outlet, started smoldering, and the fire spread fast.
He said the kids must have done it.
But all three were found sleeping in their cribs when they died.
Kay never talked about it in detail. But sometimes she'd say, "Even God couldn't forgive me for what I did."
John and his sister never believed it was just an accident.
They grew up thinking their mother had something to do with it. Whether that was true or not didn't matter, not really. What mattered was the shadow it cast. The kind of quiet, terrible fear that lingers in a house like smoke in the walls.
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Kay didn't parent. She punished. She hovered, hit, and harbored secrets.
She expected perfection in the smallest things. If John didn't fold his clothes just right, she'd dump out every drawer and make him start over. No warning. No grace. Just chaos.
She physically punished him for everything. Loud noises. Messes. Moving too slow. Breathing wrong. Existing.
Once, she told me, without shame, that when he wouldn't sleep as a child, she gave him "Sleepy Juice." It was juice punch. Spiked with alcohol.
John was a hyperactive, destructive kid. But that is no excuse. None of this was.
Kay never married the father of her daughter Daphne. She never married John's biological father either.
His stepfather, who raised him from the age of three and officially adopted him at eight, is the man he still calls Dad.
He owned a construction business, building gas stations along the turnpikes, so he was gone a lot, always traveling for work. Still, John spent most summers working with him. They laid concrete, poured fuel lines, and came home sunburned and tired.
They have a good relationship.
In fact, he's the only family John still talks to.
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John grew up in a war zone. And somewhere along the way, he became a soldier, always on edge, always waiting for betrayal. That's not drama. That's trauma. And trauma, untreated, doesn't just fade. It mutates.
Psychologists have long documented how childhood neglect, especially emotional neglect, can lead to narcissistic traits. When a child's needs for love, validation, or even basic safety go unmet, they often build a false self to survive. Something shinier. Tougher. More in control. Because being vulnerable didn't keep them safe, but being impressive sometimes did.
That's what John became: impressive. Charming. In control. At least on the surface.
Underneath, it was something else entirely.
He had all the classic hallmarks:
A constant need to be admired, even if he pretended not to care.
A deep fear of being exposed or criticized.
A tendency to twist blame or rewrite history if it threatened his ego.
The ability to be painfully cruel when he felt wounded, even if the "wound" was just me having a feeling he didn't like.
Narcissism isn't always loud. Sometimes, it's quiet. Subtle. Performed in gasps of guilt or martyrdom. Look how much I do for you. Look how hard I try. It masquerades as devotion. As self-sacrifice. But it's still rooted in control.
He didn't need everyone to worship him. He just needed me to believe that no one else ever could.
And that belief worked, for a while. I was the perfect audience. The perfect mirror. Until I wasn't.
He didn't just carry his childhood. He used it. Rewrote it. Weaponized it. And somewhere in the process, he forgot that survival mode isn't the same as love.
I didn't see it at first. But eventually, the patterns got too loud to ignore.
He didn't want healing. He wanted a hostage.