For the father whose love couldn’t reach me

I thought I needed to wait until you died to say this. Not that I wanted you to die. I didn’t. But I thought about the things I could do once you did, as if my words could not live while you did, as if they couldn’t breathe the same air.

Just wait until you can’t hurt anyone, I thought. Don’t destroy the relationship. Maybe it could change. Maybe he will understand you some day and love you how you need.

The window of what-if was vast. It was a tall window with a plush, worn seat stretched across it, and the light came in perfectly in the morning. I curled up and warmed myself there like a sleeping cat. I sat there and gazed out onto The Garden of What Could Be.

Sometimes over the years I would get glimmers of hope. The word “love” on a birthday card. A notebook or camera as a gift that made me feel like he saw my creative soul. A piece of jewelry that made me feel like he treasured me. A hug that was more than a pat on the back. A smile on his face when he saw me for the first time in months. Acts of service when I got stranded in parking lots with a car that wouldn’t start. Calling in a favor to a doctor to get me in quickly for an appointment. The night we sat in his truck when he told me he was getting married, and I cried, and he held my hand.

These moments kept me sitting at that window. They kept me sitting there, waiting for him to appear in the distance and walk through that garden to meet me. I would throw open the front door, run barefoot through the grass, and jump into his arms and say, “Daddy!” I would be six years old again. I would be the six-year-old I never was. I would feel safe in a way I never had before.

Over the years as this window got smaller and smaller and the light came through dimmer and dimmer, I thought, When he’s dying, then he’ll see clearly. I can tell him how he hurt me. He will apologize for the first time in my life. We will have tenderness. Then I can write this story with a happy ending.

 I can’t keep waiting for that day.

I can’t keep waiting for that happy ending. I can’t wait for you to die so I can live. I thought I wasn’t hurting anyone by waiting. But I was hurting someone. I was hurting myself. I wouldn’t let myself live until you died.

For what? What relationship am I so determined to protect? The text message on my birthday? The cordial Christmas and the side hug when we part? The phone conversations when we try to find things to say to each other, when I pull words from my pile of “safe conversation topics”, avoiding that other tall pile called “things I say that will end up hurting me”? The day you didn’t call on your grandson’s first birthday? The money you gave me to get new tires and to hire someone to cut down a dead tree?

It’s hard to walk away from that window. Because it’s more than a window. When I walk away from that window, this house is going up in flames. I move into a different house. A house of my own. Because I’ve never really left yours.

I remember the day I released myself of the need to be a good daughter. I thought if I were just good enough of a daughter then you would give me the love I needed. It wasn’t long ago that I gave up that story. 

I mourned you; I mourned the loss of our relationship, the relationship that never was. I let the person you are in the garden die. I had to let that person die in order to walk away from the window. I had to let that person die in order to see the real person living on the dark side of the house.  

Here’s what I see.

I am eleven years old. You are at my bedroom door where I have retreated from our conversation. Can I really call it a conversation? The thing where I work up the courage to say one thing, and you respond with a treatise pounding my feelings into the ground, outlining all the reasons I’m wrong? I’ve retreated to get some peace. You knock on my door. You have one more point to make. I stare straight ahead while sitting on my bed. You leave. Five minutes later you knock again. “I mean, come on, Catherine,” you begin, picking up right where you left off. I stare at my bedspread. You make your point, and finally you leave. How many times do you return?

I am twelve years old. I am sitting at the kitchen counter as you dictate words for me to write to Mom in a letter. “Don’t you love us, Mom? If you loved us, you would be here. Why aren’t you here? We need you.”

I am thirteen years old. You approach me in my room with a whisper one day to ask me if I’ve seen Mom taking any pills. There are some missing. You ask me to stay home from school to keep an eye on her because she’s depressed, and you’re worried about what she might do.

I am thirteen years old. I am eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen before bed. “You don’t need that. That’ll make you fat,” you tell me. Was it before that or after that that I stopped eating? I don’t even remember. What I remember is all the meals I managed to skip because we didn’t eat together. I remember all the cheese-covered hospital casseroles in styrofoam to-go boxes that I scraped into the garbage disposal and hid under layers of trash while you were on the other side of the house behind closed doors.

Did anyone notice I was starving myself? I don’t think so. I made myself physically smaller to fit the space that you had left for me. I felt like a prisoner. And this was my hunger strike. I wanted some agency, just a small shred of agency. I wanted some piece of the Earth that felt like my own, even if I decided to let it slowly die.

I am thirteen years old. You’re shouting at Mom and dumping everything out of her carry-on suitcase. “You slut!” you shout. I turn up the music in my room so loud that my speakers vibrate, but I still hear your words. Mom and I grab our toothbrushes and underwear and find our way to the car while you follow us, edging closer to our faces like the paparazzi. As she backs out of the driveway, you call out to me, “You don’t have to leave, Catherine!” That may have been the first time I felt sorry for you.

I am fourteen years old. We are eating at Hooter’s for the umpteenth time. I watch you flirting with the waitresses. “You’re too touchy feely,” you tell me when I say that I don’t want to go there, that it makes me feel sick.

I am fifteen years old. You have a weekend guest, and she’s brought her daughter. She and I watch MTV all weekend while you blare Enya behind a locked door.

I am fifteen years old. One of your weekend guests replaces my shower curtain with a clear one. A perfectly clear one that lets me see my naked body in the bathroom mirror. And the door doesn’t have a lock on it. I don’t feel safe. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel safe.

I am fifteen years old. You display Girls Gone Wild movie cases on the wall in our living room. You keep some erotica DVDs on the same shelf that has my movies. One of them is called The Red Shoe Diaries, and it says on the cover, “How far will you go?” I watch it one time when you aren’t home. I want to see what someone might want to do to my body. I want to see what might make me important.

I am fifteen years old. Mature for my age, according to everyone. We go out to dinner with some of your friends. A man you know comes up to you to say hello and asks if I’m your wife. You smile and laugh and respond in a way that conveys “no”. But I detect something in your eyes that makes me think you’re proud he thought I was your wife.

I am sixteen years old. When I start driving and go out with my friends, you call me. If I don’t answer, you call again and again and again. I have ten missed calls, all in a row. A decade later I still keep my phone on silent because of the anxiety I feel when I hear it ring. It could be you. What will I say? I learned to lie about everything. Because the truth never felt safe enough.

I am sixteen years old. You keep drug tests in the fridge after you find out I’ve been smoking pot. Would you track me via GPS, too, like the unit Mom and I found in her car?

I wish this were an exhaustive list.

Have I kept a catalogue of everything you said and did that hurt me? Yes, I think so. I have a shoebox full of the journals of all the things you said, and all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say in return.

I remember the day I released myself of the need to be a good daughter.

After several hurtful interactions between us, I sent an email to you laying down some boundaries in our relationship in order for me to stay emotionally healthy with you in my life. I titled it “Hear me”. 

I asked you to take time to process all I had said. You wrote me three emails that day.

The first one gave me hope. The second one broke down my email paragraph by paragraph, analyzing and disputing my feelings and requests.

The last one simply said:“How dare you treat me like some kind of abuser by giving me this conditional crap after all I’ve done for you. How dare you.” 

When I told my friend Ann the story of this exchange, she observed, “‘How dare you’ is the silencer, the conversation stopper. He’s not expecting you to say, ‘THIS is how I dare.’”

Well, this is how I dare.

Under your guidance I was taught to not trust my voice, to not trust myself. My keen intuition was cast aside. I was wrong. You were right. Always. End of story. Period. I was domesticated for abuse, groomed for it. I learned to doubt myself and my perception.

You tried to make me forget what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced firsthand. You deflected, you blamed others, you made me feel crazy and weak.

You wore me down. You taught me how to be worn down into submission out of sheer exhaustion and futility.

I watched how you treated my mom. I learned to tolerate that kind of treatment, too.

I learned that love is jealous, suspicious, fearful, possessive. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have rattled off that list. I thought I knew better. But what I truly knew was so deep in my heart’s memory that I couldn’t even feel it closing in on me. You normalized a terrible cycle of emotional abuse in my life.

You created a sexually charged environment in our home that made me think it was normal for sex to make people act out of control and make poor decisions.

I ran into the arms of every man who showed me affection. I wanted so desperately to be seen, to be loved, to be treasured. I wanted it so badly that I looked past their ages and the controlling ways they showed their love and the things they wanted me to do. 

I felt unworthy. I saw the women you eyeballed. I didn’t look anything like them. I didn’t act like them. I didn’t want to be them. But I thought maybe you would like me more if I did. Maybe others would like me more if I did, too.

I spent too many nights as an adolescent sitting in my bed with my teeth chattering from anger and emotions I can’t even name.

“How dare you.” Those words set me free. You revealed it all; you showed yourself. You showed that you will preserve yourself and your idea of yourself no matter how much it hurts me. In fact, you will hurt me to protect yourself even when I have come to you to tell you that I am hurting, that you have hurt me.

This is how I honor our family.

I know you love me. I know you tried in your own way. For some reason you didn’t know how to love me. Your love couldn’t reach me.

I wish you no ill will. I want nothing bad for you. I’m not trying to hurt you. It was easier for me to share the story of how I was raped by my ex-boyfriend than to share these words. I don’t want to say them, but something inside my gut is whispering to me, “Speak. Tell.” I can’t ignore that voice anymore.

I can’t keep myself from breathing so you can live. You, along with my mom, gave me life. I will live it. This is how I honor the people who gave me life. I will live my own. Otherwise, what was it all for? What was it all for–my mom, the 18-year-old who gave up an art scholarship to become a mother instead. You, the 19-year-old man who gave up dreams of marine biology and training for professional tennis to pursue a steady track in medicine.

You both started with dreams like everyone else. And what it turned into is nobody’s dream. Nobody in the world dreams of what our family turned into.

It’s time for my dream. You must have dreamed at some point before it all went to shit that your child would find a dream, follow it, reach it. It just doesn’t look like what you imagined. It doesn’t look like Doctors Without Borders and my publication in medical journals. I was meant for something else. I was meant to tell my story.

I have a dream. In my dream, I use my strong voice to tell my story. In my dream, when other people who were made to feel like their voices didn’t matter hear my story, they feel less alone. They breathe a sigh of relief. They feel less broken. They start to understand what they experienced in a new way and can start peeling off the layers of lies and hurt. They seek out the help they need. 

This is how I honor our family. With truth, with dreams backed up with bravery and hard work, with deep listening, with life-giving connections with other people, with saying the things that are difficult to say, with rigorous emotional work that allows me to truly live.

I choose life. I choose life for myself and the family I make. I will make sure that your grandson knows something different. He will be free to have his emotions. He will have his own space and boundaries. He will watch how a strong man treats a woman with respect and trust and reverence. He will be allowed to be a child.

I’m strong, Dad. I’m strong like you always told me I needed to be. I found my way. Somehow I found my way. I’m ok. In fact, I’m better than ever. You don’t need to worry about me.

I need to let go of the fact that you will probably never understand what I’ve said today. I need to let go of the fact that you will see me as ungrateful, delusional, brainwashed, crazy. I’ve already heard it more than once. Are there new things you can say to me that you haven’t said already? 

All the things I wanted to tell you when I was growing up, I told to paper instead. As you were silencing me and teaching me your own script instead, a fierce inner voice developed. One that kept me alive. One that made me feel more at home than my home. This is the voice I use today. This is how I dare.

 

Photo by: Josh Hailey Studio