Daddy Issues

This is technically a personal essay but there is no option of that. The assignment was that I had to be on the fence about something.

I don’t remember exactly when it sunk in, but I remember the feeling of the hope being drained out of my little body day by day.  He’d blown us off before, he’d show up in a few weeks.  Those few weeks turned to months, months to years and I think by 4^th grade I realized it was not likely that I would be seeing my father again. 

There is a stigma in our society about growing up fatherless.  It’s not so much saying that you have a deadbeat dad as telling people you’re being raised by a single mother.  The look in their eyes is always the same: pity.  Pity?  My mother more than makes up for the absence, or at least that’s how I viewed it, how I still view it.  They pity me because the idea of the nuclear family is so ingrained in our brains that to be raised by a single parent is to be raised with a hole in your life that nothing can fill; but you try anyway. 

This hole is dad-shaped.  Everyone has one tailored specifically to their own father, and if you should be unlucky enough to wake up and find him gone is to wake up and find yourself mutilated beyond repair. 

 

The first attempt to fill that hole is always material.  My mom has told me the story many times of how after her absentee father died, she and one of her sisters went to a thrift store and bought sweaters.  They dubbed these sweaters their father and wore them like portable hugs.  This story has a sort of darkly humorous undertone to it, but overall it just makes me sad.  It makes me think about how when my father left I wanted one of his tee shirts to get the same effect they were seeking in the sweaters.  How the need for these sweaters comes about because society tells you that to grow up without a father is to grow up with that hole in your life.  A hole that can’t be filled by your mother, or your aunts, uncles, teachers or friends.  You either have a father or you have this hole in your heart so you try to stuff a sweater in it to shut it up.   

When that fails, the next attempt to fill it is with people.  This step gives the illusion that you can indeed fill it, but you always wonder if it’s completely full, you always wonder if it would be better being filled by a father figure, you wonder if you are lying to yourself in order to protect yourself from more pain.   This is merely the tip of the fatherless ice burg though. 

 

After the look of pity and the speech about how brave and noble what my mom is doing is over, there is a second inevitable speech that happens.  “You’ll be better off without him in the long run”.  Is that really true though?  It’s sort of funny to me that everyone always seems to know exactly how they’d feel in a situation that they are not currently, nor have ever gone through before.  It should be noted here that I have a twisted sense of humor. 

Seeing as life handed me a particularly sour hand in the dad area I’d say overall a solid yes, good riddance.  However, am I missing something from my life because of the absence he created?  Am I really better off having abandonment issues, a panic disorder (aggravated by but not completely credited to daddy dearest), and a domino effect s**t storm that will take years of expensive therapy to resolve?  That I do not know. 

 

I remember wondering when I was a child how my life would be different if I had a proper father, not my father exactly, not the man who committed a felony and left, not what if he’d stuck around, but what if I had a proper father.  One that came home every night in time for dinner and would play tag with me in the yard on the weekends.  One that would be there to catch me every time I fall, and would rejoice beside me in my victories.  I’d envy my friends and my cousins watching their fathers chase them around the house and hold them and play with them and longed for that sensation.  I made father’s day cards for my mother and then cried because all the other kids had real fathers to make their cards for.  The third attempt to fill the hole is making the one parent that stuck around play the role of both parents.  This fails too. 

 

 “Daddy issues;” this is the official term that society has assigned the consequences that I pay for because my father left.  This term is thrown around so casually and callously that no one bats an eye at it.  This is a toxic phrase that on the surface brands anyone female who is fatherless as damaged.  It brands that person as if it’s their fault that they struggle to trust men, like it’s their fault that life dealt them a crappy hand, like it’s their fault that their father left or was abusive or a myriad of other things that most certainly were not their fault.  Perhaps moreover it’s the fact that girls with “daddy issues” are at fault because they allowed this to get to them. 

This brand burns deeper than it seems though.  We live in a male-centric world and so to not trust men or to act in a way that is not seen as “societally acceptable” towards men (i.e. feeding their ego 24/7) is to be in the wrong.  That is why this phrase is directed at women, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a boy being accused of having daddy issues.  It’s another tactic to put women in their place �" this one is just particularly toxic as it plays on a very painful reality. 

There is also, and most disturbingly, a sexual undertone to this phrase.  When a women has a hard time trusting a potential significant other, when she’s “desperate for attention,” when she has any hardship getting along with men, then she must have “daddy issues”.  I’ve heard this phrase used often in reference to sex workers and strippers in particular, which quite frankly makes me want to scream. 

This phrase insinuates that men are the center of the universe, the greatest creation on god’s green earth and if they’re not being worshiped 24/7, then that is your problem, not theirs.  Then you’re a prude or a b***h, then you must have “daddy issues”.  And that is disgusting, but also a terrifyingly accepted mentality in our society.  So accepted in fact, that women use it against each other as well. 

Like it wasn’t bad enough that men were using it, women also use the term particularly directed towards any woman in the sex-industry.  They use it condescendingly, like they’re better than them because their fathers stuck around or because they refuse to “let their past get to them.”  This leads to so many other issues like not properly dealing with your emotions, ending up as a woman who “hates other women,” and worst of all, starting to believe that all of this “daddy issues” bullshit is your shame and not your absentee father’s.  And that’s twisted to say the least. 

And when I go off on this logic, it makes all of my scars seem more societally provoked than charged by the actual absence of my father.  And this makes me think that I can end up having a happy ending after all because my mother always told me that what society thinks doesn’t matter anyway.  So it seems I can end up being a functioning human being and leave my father in a dusty box in the attic.  Like he’ll fade with time as my opinions and perspectives shift and change. 

But whenever you try to hide something away in a box, it has a stubborn way of refusing to be forgotten, of resurfacing at the most inopportune times.  And that’s precisely what happened to me; my own personal Pandora’s Box crashed from the shelf and forced me to face my biggest fear; it forced me to confront my estranged father.  It was one of the most surreal moments of my life -- eleven years gone from my life and there he was.

How backwards is it that my biggest fear was to face my father?  Fear is such a strange word to have associated with your father.  It’s not one that I adopted until my early teenage years when I realized that to run into my father in public would be traumatizing.  I did not know how to react to someone who’d abandoned me �" so I made a plan.  I rehearsed several scenarios in my head that I could see going down at this epic meeting.  I put us in shopping malls and parks, I used every reaction from running away to spitting in his face.  The anger started to overtake the fear as I analyzed and re-analyzed my tactic of how to deal with this monster.  When finally I did see him I found that though my heart was racing and a thousand emotions pooled into me at once, I was able to keep my composure and stare him down with my head held high, my face emotionless. 

 

            But despite this victory, no one should have to come up with a “tactic” to “deal with” their father �" no one should have to see apathy as a victory. 

 

            It was at the child support settlement case that the confrontation occurred.  My mom had to go to court and settle on an agreement to resolve the back child support and arrears.  She had asked her sister to go with her but she was busy, so I volunteered so that my mother wouldn’t have to face that beast alone.  Despite my nervousness though, this seemed the perfect time to confront him.  It was the controlled setting of a courthouse and the element of surprise on my side as there is no way he could have known I’d be there.  And yet it still felt like I had put my father in Schrodinger’s box, and until I opened it I wouldn’t know if he would be alive and at the court date, or remain dead to me. 

 

            For so long I was doing so well, I felt confident that that hole could indeed be filled and that I’d filled it.  But then the box I had been keeping him hidden away in for so many years was opened and released the daemon who was determined to re-open my wounds and pour salt in them.

 

            We were sitting on opposite sides of the courthouse and he was avoiding looking over at us.  My heart was pounding in my chest but I kept my head held high and my composure calm.  When finally he had to stand up to check in he glanced over in my direction and we made eye contact for a moment.  I thought my heart would leap out of my chest it was beating so hard.  He looked at me with such sorrow and longing, I almost pitied him for a moment. 

            Almost.

            It wasn’t until afterwards when we left the courthouse that I had to actually confront him.  He was waiting for us outside as we figured he would be, he kept his distance but came over and started talking to me.  The whole scene was like a movie, my mom and I on the steps of the courthouse, him a couple steps below us �" we were able to physically look down at him.  He was small, pathetic, and frankly in bad shape.  His face was wan and sinewy, his teeth yellow, his skin sallow.  I stared him down �" looking him in the eye for the first time in 11 years, and I was able to keep my composure, be civil, and walk away with a massive weight lifted from my chest. 

            So can I fill the hole?  I think so.  Today I do at any rate.  Probably tomorrow as well.  The image of the hole as a wound comes in waves just like anything else.  I used to pity myself, now I don’t.  But I still feel the scars left behind, I spent my whole childhood dwelling on what I didn’t have whereas nowadays I focus on my blessings.  At the end of the day I want to believe that our own self-perception is the most important thing, I want to believe that scars will disappear and say that society was wrong all along �" that I can in fact fill the hole.  I want to believe these things fully, but I don’t know if I ever truly will.   

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[Madison Juliana Alexand..]

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