My father just died, and I don’t know how to feel
Stuck in the throes of childhood
Perhaps I exaggerate. To be exact, it’s actually almost two years now since my father passed away. In all that time, I haven’t cried. Not a single tear. I haven’t felt like I’m grieving. In fact, I haven’t known how to feel. I’m numb.
Interestingly, this is more or less the same way I’ve felt when he was alive. The absence of emotion. Strange as it sounds, a necessary learned response to a relationship that never seemed to rise to the occasion. Never ever.
I’ve gone over our story again and again in therapy, to no avail, really. Each time, I get stuck in this perpetual cycle of he loves me, he loves me not, it doesn’t really matter to I don’t care.
No matter the segue though, deep disappointment is what forever plagues me when it comes to the man who was supposed to be my first love or, failing that, at least my example of ideal manhood.
Sometimes, amid the incessant rambling in my head, I feel as if I’m ungrateful. I mean, he was there all my childhood when for many I know, this was not the case. Then I start to wonder what being there means exactly. If it is ever enough on its own. There are never any ready answers.
All I know, is that once, as a young, loving, very impressionable albeit a bit precocious child, as soon as I laid eyes on this man, I decided he would be my hero. It’s strange. Because I remember that even then, as clearly as I understood who my mother was and what she does, I had no clue what to expect from my father.
As a voracious story hoarder, the best examples I leaned on were what I saw and read in stories. The way he would dress. His relationship with my mother. The way he would protect me and my siblings. How he would relate and embrace me. All made up straight from some TV show or pages of a book.
Now as an adult looking back, I accept that maybe this was my first misstep. He was none of these things and couldn’t be further from them if he tried.
Instead of the cool jeans I saw fathers wearing on TV, he always had on this stiff formal trousers and golf shirts. I never experienced the easy love I watched all the time on TV between him and my mother. Most of their time together was riddled with arguments and complaints.
There were no discreet but loving touches. To us, his kids, he was more an untouchable master than an ally. More interested in what we could do for him than walking the path with us. The man never touched me. Certainly, never in a loving way.
I was only a child, but he had this way of making me feel like I had to be useful otherwise I was just an impractical feature. Just by walking into a room. This is an affliction that still haunts me to this day. The need to be always of assistance so I can be accepted.
I don’t have many good thoughts or memories of my father but on the few times, I’m feeling charitable, I tell myself the problem was because we were from different times. How that explains his lackluster interest in any of his children, especially the girls, I’m still to figure out. Sometimes, I tell myself, it must have been how he grew up himself. That this was the only way he knew how to be.
At the end of the day though, I understand that all the reasons in the world don’t matter. Not when it comes to survival. The man was my father and his ways, whether justifiable or not, have left scars I’m still battling even as I write this.
I feel grief today, not because of the father I lost almost two years ago but the one I never really had. I cry not because I’m a victim but because of all I lost out on. Love. Acceptance. Belonging. Freedom.
At some point in my childhood, tired of the constant barbs and the dismay that came with my kind of expectations, I decided to quit. When that did not prove enough, I built a wall to protect my delicate heart and I’ve never learned how to demolish it. The safe choice, perhaps even a smart one for the child I was then, has not served me well as an adult.
If the wall is to keep away pain, then it has to bar pleasure too. It takes away the sparkle. That spontaneous connection to another human without expectation or anticipation of hurt. It’s a constant reminder to be cynical. To never trust but to always keep my heart to myself. To never live. Not really.
This is a rather a sad place to be. Exacerbated each time I see a father and daughter who obviously have a close relationship. Or closer to home, when I witness the relationship between my ex-husband and our daughter.
But, in a life that’s not without an end, what is the point? Today, I think that he was only human and could only do his best. That it is time to move on. To accept what was without rationalizing and understand that it does not define what is now and tomorrow. In other words, to exhale and let be.
