For as long as we can remember, Jenelle Evans has been a complete and total trainwreck.
But to be fair, she didn’t magically become that way.
Sure, she’s done a lot of terrible things.
After getting pregnant at 16, she signed custody of her newborn over to her mother so that she could party, and eventually so that she could develop a heroin addiction.
In addition to the drugs, she’s been arrested numerous times for assault.
She went on to have two more kids with two more men, and in all these years, she’s never shown one single ounce of self awareness.
But, as we’ve seen on Teen Mom 2, Jenelle’s mother, Barbara, has issues of her own.
Good ol’ Babs is prone to yelling, too, and she and Jenelle obviously have a very toxic relationship. She’s even said that when she was younger, she used to be a lot like her daughter.
So with Barbara for a mother, and … wait, have we ever even seen Jenelle’s father?
No, we have not.
And, according to an excerpt from Jenelle’s upcoming book, his absence played a major role in how she turned out.
Her book is titled Read Between the Lines: From the Diary of a Teenage Mom, and as you can probably imagine, it includes some old diary entries, along with some updated reflections.
In one section of the book, Jenelle writes “Robert Evans was only in my life for a little while. For that short and glorious time, I was daddy’s little girl.”
“I loved and admired him. I still do in some way.”
But, she continues, “Without warning everything changed, and my dad cut himself out of my life.”
“Even now, as a grown woman, we don’t talk. Maybe one day that will change. Maybe one day we can find one another, get to know each other, and he can finally be my father.”
“Until then, he is just my biological dad.”
She goes on to recall some things about the man — for instance, she remembers him being “an awesome singer and musician,” and he loved driving around, listening to music.
She also remembers that he didn’t get along with Barbara, mostly because of his “misplaced sense of priorities.”
“Having been in and out of my own troubled relationships,” she writes, “I can only guess at what their marriage was like.”
“It was rocky enough not to last, and that says enough on its own, I suppose.”
Sadly, she adds that she wishes she had paid more attention then “so I could watch for the same signs in my own life.”
This isn’t the first time she’s talked about her father, but it seems like this is the first time she’s going into as much detail.
Last year, she wrote a surprisingly candid entry on her website about her father, explaining that he left the family when she was just 5 or 6 years old.
She teased her book even then, writing that her older siblings and her mother “always had a sour attitude towards my father and I had no idea why.”
“Later on I found out there was a huge reason behind that. I’ll save that for my book.”
While we don’t know the big bombshell yet, Jenelle also wrote then that her parents got into “physical altercations” regularly, and though he visited them for a few years after he left Barbara, he eventually stopped.
He called once, a couple of years after that, but she never saw him again.
“I don’t know what happened in the past, everyone has a past but everyone can change,” she wrote.
“I know he loved his kids and if he didn’t he wouldn’t have tried to be in our lives in the first place.”
Oh, Jenelle …
