
It was 2008 when I found myself mid-sentence, pen in the air, as I tried so hard to think about the words that I should write next. “What do I say about my father?” I was 14 , feverish, and shivering from the biting cold of Tagaytay’s air — I was fresh off a week-long flu when my school paper adviser called at home and asked me to participate in the feature writing category of this journalism contest. But it wasn’t the fever, nor the wind that hindered my mind from functioning properly. It was June and the lecturer just told us to write about a personality sketch about our fathers for Father’s Day.
I literally couldn’t think of anything nice to say back then.
Ultimately, I lost the contest.
I thought the topic was unfair — as predictable, conservative, and “easy” it was — it was unfair. There are high school kids who don’t have decent & healthy relationships with their fathers, I wanted to scream back then. I felt out of place and unseen. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a list of unfair things between my father and I.
My father was 25 when he and my mother met. My father was a waiter at his sister’s restaurant & bar, where my mother, who was only 20 by then, also worked. They fell in love quickly and dated for three months before they had me and left for Japan to work in the hope of a better future.
My mother would often tell me that they did all sorts of cheesy things that any young couple did in the 90s. They had matching couple shirts, watched movies in the Old Vira mall, ate ice cream as they strolled along Manila Bay. They were two lovestruck fools.
But this shotgun love story was cut short some time in the morning of early 2000s. My mom and I were preparing for another fishing trip to Island Cove with my father’s family. We were waiting in my mom’s family home when photo albums fell and suddenly, my mom screamed. My mom screamed and cried and I, who was hastily getting dressed, couldn’t understand what was happening. It had something to do with a picture of my dad that my mom found. In a rage of fit, my mom quickly went into a barrage of argumentative texts with my aunt and grandma on my father’s side of the family. They were trying to explain things to her, I think.
My mom didn’t come along to the fishing trip. I knew something was off, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. I can’t even recall where my father was at that time. All I know is that when my mother came to get me in the evening, she and my aunt (her sister-in-law) hugged it out while she was red-faced and teary-eyed. In my eyes, things got alright again.
Certainly, it didn’t.
It’s funny because in retrospect, I found out exactly about my father’s new girlfriend in the same way that my mother did, some years ago. I was around 11 and I was staying at my father’s home in Las Piñas. I was hanging out in his room when I saw the pictures — an entire album filled with photos of him with his then-girlfriend, taken in Japan. He probably has more pictures with that girl than he has with me.
It was 2005 and my parents have already divorced. My mom re-married and moved to Japan to work again while my father stayed in the Philippines to continue working at his sister’s bar & restaurant. Every month, my father would take me out for lunch, buy me new stuff, and give me some allowance. It was the reason I got a copy of Total Girl monthly without fail for two years. It was also the reason why I got the chance to have physical copies of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy albums.
Every now and then, I would stay over at my father’s house during summer and semestral break. He had a girlfriend at that time, who also happened to live with him at his parents’ house. Before picking me up one summer, he asked me if it was alright for him to have his girlfriend around and I merely answered yes, on the account that he accepts that I was also in love with Gerard Way, haha.
It was an ex-deal sealed by a pinky promise. The girlfriend was blonde, young, and beautiful — probably a few years younger than my mom. I had no reservations about the woman because I knew nothing about her and I thought I was completely alright with my father’s arrangement, but every time she entered the room with him, I felt this strange, irrevocable fit of anger. I would excuse myself out and proceed to the bedroom just to watch TV, or hang out with my cousins, or stare mindlessly in the rooftop. All just because I couldn’t bear the anger I felt. I couldn’t stomach having her around.
I didn’t understand why I felt that way. To sort my feelings out, I wrote all of these down in a diary that I kept and brought everywhere with me. Unbeknownst to my knowledge, the diary was read by my grandma whenever I wasn’t looking. One morning, she sat me down and said she understood my anger & irritation towards my father, but she hopes I can find it in my heart to forgive him, because he’s still my father.
He is my father, they would often emphasise.
The monthly visits have stopped. It was 2009 and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have also popped up. I was 15, in high school, addicted to the internet, and more miserable than I have ever been in my entire life.
Father’s Day rolled in. I didn’t have any grand gestures or gifts for my father; I was in school in Cavite and he was still living in Las Piñas. I think the day has barely even started when I received an accusing, “Hindi mo man lang ba ako babatiin ng Happy Father’s Day? (Won’t you even greet me Happy Father’s Day?)” in my Facebook messages.
I obliged. Or I just didn’t respond. I couldn’t recall how I reacted. But I remember complaining about it in class, and I certainly remember thinking why does this man think I should greet him, when he doesn’t even talk to me regularly? All he does is tell me, “How are you?” and then the conversation ends shortly after that. What was I supposed to tell him? “Hey dad, guess what? I was on anti-depressants and I tried to overdose on them last week but I didn’t die and I just woke up feeling groggy as hell! I tried to hang myself just recently but it still didn’t work out! Sorry to tell you but your daughter is still very much alive. Happy Father’s Day!!!”
There was a week in the summer of 2011 where I was just so done and over with everything that I deleted my social media accounts, which, at that time, was a pretty big thing to me because I had a thousand followers in some of them, and 1,000 followers when you’re not a celebrity was a quite a big deal back then. I isolated myself in my room and didn’t eat on time, didn’t turn on the lights, didn’t dare go outside. I may have stopped on my medication already, but I was hell-bent on starving myself to death.
Prayers have become null. In one last desperate attempt, I even prayed to the devil once and begged for him to just ‘get me’, because hell and what it entails seemed a whole lot better than the kind of emotional, unfathomable, and unbearable pain that I was feeling. I just wanted it all to stop.
The help — both from heavens & hell — obviously didn’t come. I stopped believing in God after that.
One of my friends (who would later on be my girlfriend) reached out to me after I tried to disappear on the internet. We were chatting on MSN the whole night, talking about our lives, when the conversation veered into family history.
“I think your parents’ divorce had an effect on you,” She said. “Maybe it’s why you’re so sad.”
I remember that exact moment when I was eight and my mom was crying when I gave her my ‘blessing’ to go divorce my father because I just want her to be happy, for once.
“No,” I told her. “I was completely fine with that.”
“Maybe you were just repressing your feelings?”
I was firm on my answer.
“I don’t think so.”
It’s the year 2019, I’m 25, and at work when I received a message request from my brother’s ex-boyfriend.
“We already broke up, ate. Please take care of him.”
I patiently waited as my brother’s ex-boyfriend explained the reasons why without prompt. He said he doesn’t know how to handle my brother’s emotional outbursts and depressive episodes anymore. It was like a punch to the gut because I remember being in the same, exact situation. Eight years ago, when I was my brother’s age, my ex-girlfriend used to message my mom and my friends because I was on the verge of killing myself.
I took a step back mentally and became irrevocably angry again. There are literally several studies that prove there’s a link between absent fathers and depression among adolescents. I guess I was alright with it affecting me because this whole time, I thought it was just me, but realising that it has even affected my brother and the cycle just repeats? It’s infuriating and incredibly frustrating.
Nowadays, my father busies himself taking care of dogs in his family home. He breeds, sells, and plays with dogs all while my mom and I does the brunt of the work when it comes to supporting their children financially and emotionally. My father would message me with the usual one-liner of “How are you?” then go back right away to walking his dogs, all while my brother cries himself to sleep, or while my mom and I struggle to make ends meet.
I can’t blame him. Dogs are little, cute, and easier to love than humans. Dogs will always be loyal and worship you endlessly no matter what kind of person you are. Dogs will lick you and play with you and cuddle you even if you are the kind of father who cheats on his wife and makes children and pretends they don’t exist for the rest of your life.
Don’t get me wrong — I love dogs. But sometimes, I wish my father has realised early on that he’d rather grow old with animals instead of having children he refuses to acknowledge anyway.
When my uncle from my paternal family died, my cousin (who was his son) refused to attend his funeral. The hearse has already started and my aunt and other relatives have already called, but my cousin didn’t budge.
At that time, I didn’t understand my cousin. That’s your father, I thought. Albeit, dead, but he’s still your father, right?
Now that I’m older, wiser, and a hundred percent bitchier, I totally get it. It’s funny how Bojack Horseman, a cartoon show about an alcoholic and depressed celebrity horse was the one that helped me realize this. But I totally get it.
How could you grieve someone who was never nice to you? How could you forgive someone who wasn’t even sorry in the first place? How could you call someone a father who wasn’t even — with all due respect — a father to you, despite what science says?
It’s a sick cycle that only repeats itself: childhood trauma and depression; depression and absent fathers. It makes me wonder if it’s just in the blood — it can’t be a coincidence that my own father and his brother are both absent fathers. And then I look at my maternal’s side of the family and see it more: my cousin and her daughter who have been abandoned by their baby daddy, my grandfather who spent the majority of his youth gambling instead of helping his wife support their children.
Is it just men who suck? Why is there no single responsible man in my family who’d support himself and hold himself accountable for all the things that he did? Why are they all assholes?
I’m at the queue at the bank, waiting for my turn so I could pay for my brother’s tuition. Out of curiosity, I tried to Google if there are any articles about daughters who wrote about their absent fathers. I came across this one, which talked about how the “gift of missing men” gave way to an environment of strong matriarchs around her.
I am the same way. I am surrounded by strong women who have raised and taught me how to be independent and do things on my own, and how to help myself when no one else would. But at the same time, I can’t help but be unapologetically angry.
Why are these people not held accountable enough?
Children are wired, predisposed, and taught to love their parents all their life. And when they do the opposite, they are guilt-tripped into doing the right thing, even if they have every reason to be angry. What are these children left to do when they can’t hate their parents? They hate themselves. And as they grow older, the anger manifests into something long-lasting that are bound to affect them for the rest of their lives.
It’s the first of November and in around 54 days, my brother and I would be going to my father’s home again to spend Christmas with him. That has been the tradition for as long as I can remember, even after my parents went separate ways. That’s also the only time where I can feel any semblance of warmth from my father because his definition of parenting only comes once or twice every year.
But that’s the thing: you can’t fix everything with grand gestures. Maybe it’s why Bojack’s eulogy in the “Free Churro” episode has resonated with me so much. ““You can’t just screw up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day. Which is so hard.”
And although that’s the case, you wait. You wait, hoping that one day, maybe one fucking day, something in that tiny, terribly brain of his would spark and motivate him to finally get off their asses and properly reach out to his children. That tiny glimmer of hope to have a decent and normal relationship with your father, as far as normal goes. You continue to wait, even though you’re not sure if it will ever come. And every day that it doesn’t — every single day — you get filled with resentment and rage. Because at the end of the day, you know you might never have that chance again. Because at the end of it all, what he shows you is this: he acknowledges that you’re there, but he just doesn’t fucking care.
