Reblogged from Andrew Joyce:

I grew up without a mother. My father told me that she had died shortly after I was born. To me, it was no big deal. You can’t miss what you’ve never had. My father, I think, tried to make it up to me in so many ways. In the morning, he always saw me off to school after having fed me a hot breakfast. He was always home from work in time to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour. He taught me to hunt and fish like any father would, and he never missed a parent-teacher conference at school like many fathers do.

However, by the time I was twelve, I was pretty much self-sufficient. It gave the old man a break from his domestic duties. I was now making my own breakfast, although sometimes my father wasn’t too happy with my choice of foods. I can still hear him saying in mock anger: “That cereal you devour is nothing but pure sugar.” Putting aside my culinary choices, we had settled into a comfortable routine. And there was an unshakable bond between us.

Continue reading this short story at Andrew Joyce