Today host Craig Melvin opens up about his alcoholic father

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June 15, 2021 – ‘In elementary school, when kids’ dads were showing up for soccer games and little league, my dad wasn’t there. As I got older, he missed more important things,’ … While they knew that Lawrence loved them, he worked the graveyard shift at a postal facility and was either sleeping or drinking during their waking hours.

In his book, which he describes as an ‘exploration of fatherhood,’ Craig detailed instances in which his father failed him and his brothers, including the time he left Ryan at grade school.

‘Pops would pick up Ryan when Mom was at work. But this day he never showed up,’ he wrote. ‘He had gotten drunk and was either passed out or gambling at Tom’s Party shop.’ Craig said a teacher had to wait with Ryan for hours until their mother could pick him up after work. He also wrote about how his friends started calling his dad ‘Ghost’ because he was never around, a nickname that weighed on him.

‘The nickname really bugged me. Most of my other friends, their dads were present,’ he explained. ‘I had written mine off. It got to a point where I thought, “Oh damn it to hell. I got a dad, but I don’t really have a dad.” He was like a ghost: there, but not there.’

In a segment about the book that aired on the Today show on Tuesday, Craig said that the older he and his brothers got, the worse their father’s drinking got.

‘By the time I left for college, we were almost estranged in some ways,’ he admitted, recalling how his family staged an intervention for his father in 2018.