A birthday isn’t a birthday without happy e-cards

I think more adults should think about the negative effects that their actions have on children. Not all of their actions will have negative effects, but certain ones will. This makes me remember a traumatic childhood experience I had when I was 4 years old.

The Internet did not exist when I was 4. But that didn’t stop my psychopath father from believing that he had time traveled into the future, set up a few happy birthday e cardsfor me, and came back to the present time. Imagine my face as he told me what he had done. I didn’t understand the principles of time travel. How was I supposed to know that what he had actually done for me was a good thing?

To a four year old, it amounted to one thing: I had no paper birthday card in my hand on the day of my birthday. That’s pretty traumatic stuff. On top of that, I asked for a life size cut-out of David Hasslehoff, but I didn’t get it. My parents claimed that a four year old girl had no business having The Hasslehoff on her bedroom wall. What a bunch of you-know-what.  I hated them for weeks after that. Turns out that in my father’s time travels to the future, he saw some of D.H.’s drunken video escapades online So he again did me a favor for not exposing me to a man cut-out that would turn out to be a not so heroic example of what a man should be. Gosh, I love my psychopath father.