Dear Sugar,
I’ve been dating a man—whom I’ll call William—for nearly three years. He has an adult daughter in her early twenties. William and his ex-wife were divorced just as their daughter was graduating from high school. Their marriage was chaotic; the ex was highly emotionally abusive, and eventually, to protect himself, William began to respond in kind. Toward the end, William had pretty much given up on his life. He’s been honest with me about the failures of the marriage and his failures as a parent. He did the best he could, but he married far too young, without a clear understanding of his wife’s past (she carried a history of emotional, physical, and possibly sexual abuse from her father) and without an understanding of how his own unresolved childhood emotional neglect and abuse would impact his functioning as a spouse and as a parent. He would like to heal his relationship with his daughter, but she refuses to respond to him.
I don’t know whether he has ever articulated to her that he knows he has a lot to answer for. I don’t know whether she has any knowledge of how much he has changed since the divorce—he’s spent time in therapy, and has also regained much of the core self that he had to put away, for safety, during the emotionally abusive marriage. He was never abusive to his daughter, but he did fail to protect her both from the horror of the marriage, and from the manipulation and abuse from her mother. She had to grow up and become independent far too young, because her parents couldn’t parent her. William’s estrangement from his daughter is a heartbreak that pitches every day of his life in a minor key.
Several times I have wondered whether it would be a positive risk, or an unforgivable interference, for me to write to the daughter and tell her how much her father wants to repair the relationship. I would in no way suggest that she owes him the chance, or that she’s obligated to do it. I would only tell here: here’s how your dad feels, here’s what he’s ready and able to give you; he’s ready to hear everything you have to say, and to take responsibility for the ways he’s failed you, so if you ever feel inclined, please know that he’s the version of himself that you deserved to have growing up, and maybe it would be worthwhile to explore what it would be like to have him as a father.
I just wonder if she might be able to hear this from a third party more clearly than she can hear it from her father, to whom she will not grant an audience.
What do you think, Sugar? Positive risk or unforgivable interference?
Signed,
Feeling Helpless on the Sidelines
Dear Feeling Helpless,
I understand your impulse, sweet pea, but I think it would be a big mistake to write a letter to your partner’s daughter. I’m fairly certain your words would amplify rather than ameliorate her anger and hurt, no matter how well intentioned your words may be. She needs her father, not you, to be the one to offer his contrition and love.
Your William is, by your own account, a different William than hers. A letter from you instead of him would serve only as painful proof of that—not that her father has transformed his life, but that he’s still the same dad she knew all along. The one who blames his mistakes on her mother and leans on his new partner to offer his love by proxy. What other conclusion could she possibly come to? I know that’s a harsh interpretation of what’s going on here, and the situation is more complex than this, but I think it’s important that you view this from her own wounded vantage point, rather than your own. Your impulse to reach out to your partner’s daughter rises from the good man you know William to be; her reaction will be rooted in the failed father you all acknowledge he is.
You write you’re not sure whether William has “ever articulated to her that he knows he has a lot to answer for,” but I’ll guess your uncertainty on this matter tells me he hasn’t. If he is truly eager to make amends, then why has he neglected to make them? Perhaps because he’s scared. Perhaps because he hasn’t yet changed to the extent you imagine. Perhaps because it’s there inside him—all the ugly he has to account for and all the beauty he has to give his daughter—but he needs an emotionally evolved woman such as you to kick his ass into gear.
That’s where I advise you to focus your efforts in this, sweet pea—by supporting your partner as he works up the courage to love his daughter and take responsibility for his mistakes, by offering your friendship without doing the emotional work that he must do alone, by trusting he’s capable of repairing what only he has the power to fix.
Regular readers of this column will know that I’m either the best person to offer you insight on this matter or the worst. Like your partner’s daughter, I have some serious daddy sorrow too. I’m estranged from both of my fathers—my biological father, with whom I’ve had only intermittent contact since I was a young child, and my stepfather, who I loved as my father for over a decade until my mom died and the jig was up. My loss and my rage are everywhere in these words. I can’t pretend otherwise.
I spent my teen years in the most podunk place you can imagine. My stepfather still lives on the land I believed I’d always consider home, in the house my family built with our own hands, behind which there is a path through the woods that leads to the grave I can no longer visit. My mother’s. I hardly ever go back because doing so is just too sad and too hard and at some point in each visit I inevitably wind up in a bar where I run into a mildly drunk man I once knew, who rests his arm too heavily across my shoulders and exclaims how great it is to see me and how cool it is that I “went so far” and how proud my stepfather is of me.
“Really?” I always ask, unable to keep myself from beaming. “He’s proud of me?”
“He’s so proud of you.”
“REALLY?”
“He brags about you all the time.”
“He does?”
“He misses you kids. He’s not the same, since your mom died.”
“You think?” I ask.
And so on, until the tiny bubble that’s filled with the excruciating air of my need bursts inside me and I realize what a crock of shit it is—that even if it’s literally true, it’s a vicious cosmic lie, this half-assed, spineless daddy love broadcast via a drunk guy in a backwoods bar. How worthless, how weak, how vanquished, how hollow it is to have a father who exists but cannot reach, who says but will not be, who thinks but doesn’t dare, who plays and plays and plays, but only, always, forever in the minor key.
We sing the song of parenthood in only the major notes. Were you there? Did you love full-throttle? Did you fix it after you fucked it up?
What shocks me as a daughter is how long I’ll wait for those answers to be yes instead of no and I know in my heart William’s daughter is waiting too. How powerfully we’ve accepted the loss of our failed fathers and yet also how potently they reside within us.
I’ve come to peace with the fact that I may never speak to either of my fathers again, but also with the knowledge that if they said the right words, I would without hesitation listen. And I’d bet anything that your partner’s daughter will listen to her father someday too, Feeling Helpless. But only once he relinquishes the voice of the father who didn’t do right by her and addresses her as the father she deserves. Even if it scares him and hurts him and compels him to acknowledge parts of himself he loathes and remember things he’d rather forget and explain choices that are beyond explanation and forces him to stop holding his ex responsible for a fair portion of his own bad behavior.
Which, he totally has to do, by the way. And so do you. I get it that some people are just plain nuts. I don’t doubt your partner’s ex was a crazy bitch. But we’re responsible for ourselves. Not blaming our own bad choices on others is a basic principle of functional mental health and emotional maturity. It’s the reason I spend half my day explaining to one of the baby Sugars why it’s not okay to whack the other baby Sugar in the head even when he/she steals his/her toast/ball/stuffed parrot/blue marker.
Until William is able to own his choices, to ask for forgiveness without tangling up his ex in his apology, he’s not ready to speak to his daughter. This has to do not only with taking responsibility for his actions, but also with trusting this young woman who’s been through so much. She doesn’t need anyone to explain to her the precise ways in which each of her parents fucked up. She knows. She alone witnessed how it was they played off each other, who goaded whom into what.
The oddest thing happened to me as I was writing this letter to you. It’s one of those things that if I wrote it into a novel everyone would say how contrived it was, how too convenient the timing. At the very moment that I was composing the paragraph about meeting those drunk guys in bars who tell me my stepfather is proud of me, an email popped into my inbox—not to Sugar, but to the real me. It was a Facebook message that informed me my father wanted to be “friends.” My father wants to be friends! This is the man I have seen something like three times since I was six, who I wrote about in “The Empty Bowl,” and other columns, who four years ago, almost to the day, demanded that I never contact him again, who said he was glad to be finally rid of me.
I’ve had no contact with him since then, but it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t get rid of me, that he is instead attempting in this banal and cowardly way to pull me back into his sphere. His friend request came with no message. It just sat there, blankly insisting I choose “confirm” or “not now.”
That not now sort of kills me. It’s the rejection that can’t say no; the annihilated optimism of the eternally wronged sons and daughters spelled out in code. Not now implies maybe later. It aches for another chance. It ventures possibly someday.
As I clicked on that not now, I thought about William’s daughter refusing to “grant him an audience” and it occurred to me that she, like me, has denied him this because, thus far, it’s always been the same dumb show. Maybe she can’t yet trust her dad to perform the only act she can bear at this late date to sit through: the redemptive one.
That’s William’s task. To redeem himself by being the man who lives out his healing transformation by becoming the father he failed to be before. By doing it, no excuses, and doing it right.
Yours,
Sugar
77 responses
I think you are too hard on these flawed men- are you perfect? Your post before regarding Mr Sugar’s affair showed that you understand people are flawed- why do they have to be perfect before you will let them in? Love and fear are the only emotions we feel- love, don’t fear.
Oh Sugar, thou art goddess. I just wanted you to know that when someone wants to be your FB friend and you only click not now, depending on your settings, they will be able to see things that you or other people post on your own facebook page, who you decide to friend, etc. If you don’t want to be friends with someone, then you have to go one layer deeper and remove the request completely. Just sayin…
hugs to you.
Oh god, Sugar. This one hit me directly in the gut. I don’t talk to my father, and you articulated nearly every fucking reason why I don’t. It made me feel better, and there’s precious little that ever makes me feel better about that, so thank you.
It’s sad that the only thing William could think of in order “to protect himself” was to respond with similar emotional abuse. It’s the daughter he should have been concerned about protecting. And if it meant leaving and making sure that the time she spent with him was free from agita…but, what do I know.
Except this: William should be writing letters to his daughter. She may rip them up, throw them in the fire or put them in a drawer. Until, one day, when she’s able and ready, she will open the next one. And read.
“Not blaming our own bad choices on others is a basic principal of functional mental health and emotional maturity”. That’s it. That’s all.
As someone who had to fight, claw and wrestle for a relationship with her estranged father, I thank you for your answer to the well-meaning woman. It has to come from only him and it has to be overt. You are also right that it would be more of a confirmation of the daughter’s beliefs about her father than any kind of sign of his willingness to make amends. Thanks so much for this response.
“We sing the song of parenthood in only the major notes. Were you there? Did you love full-throttle? Did you fix it after you fucked it up?”
That should be tattooed on every parent’s forearm. The world might be a smidge of a better place if we didn’t have all these wounded, broken people raising children of their own.
I don’t talk to my father either, and like Kari, there is little that ever makes me feel okay about that.
Once, one of his girlfriends called me up to say that I needed to talk with him, that he was sad and I needed to call and cheer him up. I was so angry! He never called when I was sad. He never cheered me up! He came through town once or twice a year from the time I was three until college and each time took me to eat at a diner and bought me a toy.
At this point in my 38 years, I am not interested in his predictable routine. I don’t want to hear (first) how broke he is and then, “So are you a success yet? Hahah!” So I don’t usually answer the phone when he calls.
Thank you, Sugar, for helping me to better understand why I respond the way I do.
“It’s a vicious, cosmic lie, this half-assed, spineless daddy love” made me laugh out loud, then burst into tears. (So, y’know, just a regular Thursday at 12:05 p.m. around these parts.)
Another crazybeautiful gut punch from Sugar.
Sugar, you never cease to amaze me with your insight and clarity. I am one year post divorce from a man who is behaving very similarly to William above, with the exception of the reasons why. Our 17 and 14 year old are hurt beyond words and want nothing further to do with him – except they deperately still need his love and approval. I am going to forward him this column and hope like hell that he reads it – the angry phone call I will likely get in return will be a small price to pay. Thank you, from the bottom of our collectively repairing hearts.
Wow. Sugar, you just put into words what I have never been able to. Thank you so much and thank the twitterverse for sending me your way. The only difference is that it is my mother who is the crazy one in my family dynamic.
So many people don’t understand how I can absolutely refuse to have any contact with her. They’ll plead with me “but, she’s your mother.” To which I always respond, “that’s not my fault.”
I don’t know that there is anything, and I mean anything, that would make me ever risk the possibility of her hurting me or anyone I care about again, but a real apology might be a first step. And by apology, I mean actually owning what she did and not simply hiding behind “I made mistakes.”
Gah, this is so raw as I’m sure is coming across, but, again, I want to thank you for putting words to my thoughts and feelings.
Sugar – Every week you write something that speaks to my heart.
It has been a very long while since I even thought about my father (or my parents in general). Some time ago, I came out to them for the second time. My first time was at 16; the second at 39. I write them a request once a year for contact while explaining that I will not hide. The thing I realized this year is that I have always hidden with them… Yes my sexuality, but more importantly, who I am. The parts of myself that they did not want to see. It seems sometimes that the differences between a parent and child are too great to span even with love.
I once read that sometimes familial relationships should be dealt with more like divorces, that sometimes there are irreconciable differences. This makes so much sense to me, logically. Emotionally, my daddy love persists….
I was estranged from my father for about a decade, from the depths of my “podunk” teens after he and Mom divorced, through my mid-twenties. He failed a lot during those years before finally doing a lot of his own work, but it finally took a nasty motorcycle accident, one that tried to kill me a few times, to bring him out of the shadows again to try to breach the chasm that we’d chosen to create.
It took (is still taking) years to repair the relationship. That accident is 18 years behind me and the detente is something I allowed and pursued as much for his sake as for mine. At least at first. I don’t know if I would call our relationship a father/son one (I doubt it will ever be), but we’re friends again and that’s a bit of a miracle all by itself.
I don’t know much, but I think I know this: If I hadn’t cleaned out the hording of my anger and bitterness before that car hit me, he’d have never made past the hospital room door for all the stacks of crap. Our absent fathers may never knock on our doors in a way and from a place that is appropriate. We can’t control that. But we can clean out the house behind that door and live in the absence of anger. They have no say over how we grow and heal.
And, if they do come one day, there’ll at least be room for them to sit down and try to make it right.
Does it make me a bad person that I wonder if, five years from now, Feeling Helpless will have an entirely different take on the situation?
I was emotionally abused in my first marriage, and while I left before it crossed into stereotypical physical abuse, but it was already heading quickly down that path. So it’s perfectly possible that I am just biased, and unable to believe someone might transform themselves. However, what I hear William saying is “she made me do it”, and that raises the hackles on the back of my neck. Nothing is more typical of an abuser than to explain that really, he’s a perfectly nice guy who’s behaving in a perfectly reasonable manner, and YOU (or in this case, the ex-wife) are the one with the problem.
If he’s serious about healing himself and his relationship with his child, he and his therapist ought to be exploring how he can make amends to her for his own actions. The fact that he’s still framing his behavior as “doing the best he could” says an awful lot to me about where his head is.
it’s absolutely true, from the lifetime experience of another difficult dad person. “feeling helpless” if you can wrap your head around how compelled you are to help mend the situation, and then realize that it’s not that hard to actually do the reaching out, then the only question left is, what’s stopping him? your man may have changed, but he is still very hung up on whatever it is that prevents him from moving forward, so he makes a victim of himself even when attempting to talk about his own fault in the situation. if seeing the obvious gap in the situation has gotten you to offer to do the work for him, just be careful about the possible codependent dynamics going on there, these aren’t usually accidents.
and some of us kids maybe keep this stuff going and victimize ourselves [i think it’s part of the process, and okay as long as you move past it and don’t remain a victim]. but a lot of us are just not interested in repeating the cycle. getting sucked in with the hope that things will be different is the biggest battle we fight.
i will say this though: some dads can change. sometimes it takes them 20 years, and getting sober, and learning to back off of feelings before taking action. sometimes it takes our willingness to trust after a lot of failed false starts. if the me of 20 years ago got a note from the future that said i’d have a healthy relationship with my father, i never would have believed it. i’m certainly not advocating that anyone repeatedly put themselves in the path of danger with the hope things might change, but if you do see actual change happening, and you are able to test the waters safely, i tell you—some of our dads out there are finally growing up.
I might be William’s ex-wife. the alleged crazy bitch, battered wife, discarded ex-wife after he moved in with “Feeling Helpless on the Sidelines”. He is a highly skilled con artist. Keep your eyes closed and mind your own business, FHotS. Which is what you could have done if you weren’t a compulsive rescuer and active codependent addict. Battered women DO NOT press charges due to fear of retaliation, toward themselves or their children at any time or age. I would hands down rather be labeled a crazy bitch while watching my kids grow and heal, than end up in the morgue. The above scenario is the only safe way out of an abusive relationship and for this I thank you. Your gullibility is understandable, it worked on me for over 22 years. Wake up sister, you are being conned. But please don’t leave him because my kids and I are probably not safe if he’s not playing his victim game with someone else. So give my kids a break, FHotS and back the fuck off.
Those baby Sugars are damn lucky. And blessed. I want a “Baby Sugar” t-shirt.
My daddy died any number of years ago and he was a messed up son-of-a-gun (unrecovered alcoholic, womanizer, seemingly pathological liar and that’s just the beginning) AND he loved me enough so that I could heal from all that damage. I could sit next to his bed holding his hand with one of mine (and reading Gore Vidal’s essays with the other)(ironically a friend of my fathers)as he died, and know that our “accounts were current”. All we have is now.
Simply amazing, you are!
It speaks to all of us with varying forms of daddy issues. You have a keen insight into the true form of the letters you receive. We are blessed to be so lucky to gain from your advice/experience.
I hope your response is taken well into consideration and further serves to improve her relationship w/ her husband, his relationship w/ himself, and ultimately his relationship w/ his daughter.
😀
Thank you for this, Sugar! You gave exactly the right advice.
I was in the daughter’s shoes. My relationship with my father was a wreck; he could never take responsibility for his mistakes and he consistently injured me emotionally. When I finally started leading a life without him in it, his new wife began sending me letters.
Those letters brought back all the pain I had tried to forget. They made me even angrier at my father. His wife was trying to tell me what a good man he was, and how much he missed having me in his life – but if that was true, why couldn’t he tell me that himself? I would pick up the phone if he called. But he never did.
Feeling Helpless should stay far away from this. If William wanted to reach out to his daughter, he would have done it himself.
Michael, you are awesome. Well said.
Sugar – can you mail this letter to MY biological father? Please? You have put into words EXACTLY what I need from him. I am now 40, and he was so sporadic in my young life (he left while my mother was still pregnant with me), I barely knew him. He attempted to come back when I was in my late teens, and then in my early 20s, I got a well-meaning letter such as Feeling Helpless writes, from his (third) wife. It didn’t mean much to me so I can attest to Feeling Helpless that she should probably not send such a letter. I saw my bio-father briefly at a family member’s funeral 6 years ago, and again, he made promises but never came through with them. I wonder if he’s ever going to try and contact me. Thankfully, my mother remarried and I have a wonderful adoptive dad who’s given me the fatherly love and attention that I never had from my bio-father. It continues to this day, and he is a fantastic grandfather to my children. I’m sorry you don’t have that. Thank you for this letter.
Dear Sugar,
Thank you for your kind and thoughtful response, the core of which is exactly right: this is William’s work to do. And in fact, he and I have discussed in the past that if he wants a relationship with his daughter, he has to fight for it. And I know what stops him — paralyzing fear of rejection. And we’ve had the discussion about the fact that fear of rejection isn’t a luxury he can allow himself in this situation. But he isn’t past that fear yet, and it will clearly require some more time and work before he is. I’ve encouraged him to e-mail or text his daughter a couple of times a week, with no expectation of a reply; just to send it out there that he’s thinking of her, what reminds him of her during the day, how he feels about her. And I’ve suggested that if he keeps showing up whether she wants him to or not, sooner or later she’ll believe that he means it. He can’t do it at this point, and I imagine that the chief lesson here for me is that I need to either learn more patience with people’s processes, or decide whether his paralysis is a dealbreaker for me.
But one thing I wanted to clarify, which I really regret not having been very clear about in the letter (you know how it is… one types in a bit of a state, and one knows one’s own situation, and one hits “send” with a fear of regretting ever having written, without bothering to re-read) is that my musings about William’s ex and his marriage are my musings, not his. He has never blamed his ex for the failure of their marriage, and has never blamed her for the relationship he has with his daughter. He has never, not once, said that he did the best he could.
What he says is that he fucked up, massively, in ways that he can clearly identify and describe. I, as an observer, am saying that he did the best he could — the best he knew how, given his own completely shattered childhood and young adulthood with no examples of good parenting or good relationships. I see the dynamic in the marriage that was very much like the abusive relationship he was used to from his parents. But I don’t blame his ex, and neither does he. It’s just information, from me, to explain what the dynamic of the marriage was, and why it was hard on their kid, and why he wasn’t there for her in the way he knows he should have been.
But he’s been there in ways some dads never were…including living on the brink of poverty to make sure that child support and spousal support obligations were fulfilled. He still provides his daughter’s health insurance. He’s tried several times to help with college tuition. I know these things are true because I’ve seen state records and paystub deductions to prove it. These things aren’t the same as figuring out how to get to the place where he can open up to her and be strong enough to be vulnerable and get past his fear. But hopefully they will be a little something to build on, for the two of them, when they get to that place of talking openly, as I very much hope they will.
Wow! Thanks for that, Sugar….made me cry.
My father left when my brother and I were 10 months old, and two sisters were 4 & 9. He was selfish then and is still selfish 46 years later. I still talk to him on occasion, he’s a harmless, eccentric and lonely old man. I tried many times to reject him but kept getting drawn back to him because of the realization that he’s a wounded man, damaged. That’s only possible because he is not abusive and is supportive of my lifestyle.
My mother and two sisters (and their families), disowned me due to their fundamentalist Christian life and my gay “choice.” That went on for 9 years when my mother and I reconciled on her condition that I not talk about my lifestyle or my partner. Six months later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died 6 years later. I supported her as best as I could through the whole ordeal to which she was grateful.
I say all of this because your answer made me think about hope. How we hope for a shred of unconditional love and acceptance from our parents. I hoped until the day she died, 1.5 years ago. Hope is a double-edged sword. I never felt so free as I did the day that she died and I cry now, reading this, because that’s such a sad commentary. ty! xo
Ah, Sugar. The friend request. My father recently sent me one over LinkedIn. Such a paltry gesture framed against the terror and abuse he committed against me.
Feeling Helpless, all that ran through my head as I read your letter is that you don’t know what happened between William and his daughter. Terrible things can happen in families, and very few, it seems, are able to fully own their part in them. You know he has started his work, but you don’t know how far along the path he has come, or how far along the path he has yet to go.
All you can know is that he’s gotten far enough along the path to meet you. Let that be enough.
I grew up with a half-absent, half-emotionally abusive father and a mother who didn’t stand up to him or defend me. This article encompasses both of my parents and how I feel about them. Recently my father, with whom I haven’t spoken for eight years, turned up again only to die ten days later. I got a chance to speak with him one last time and tell him what a worthless, spineless worm I thought he was. He tried to tell me he loved me, etc. but that couldn’t erase the 26 years I needed him and he wasn’t there. I don’t regret screaming “fuck you” at a dying man because it was how I felt and how I still feel. He wasn’t there. He didn’t try to fix his fuck up until he was on his way out. I’m not convinced that he tried to fix it at all, but I’ll never know.
My siblings and my mother think, essentially, that I’m a pathetic, bitter person because I don’t feel he deserves forgiveness. To forgive something is to condone it, in my mind, and I can’t do either. No one in my family will tell me that I did the right thing, that I’m doing the right thing, that he was a bad person who didn’t deserve to see me grow into the person I am. And that hurts.
Had he lived, I don’t know if I could have built a relationship with him. I hated and feared him all my life, and I can’t get rid of that quickly or easily. I’m trying now to build a relationship with my mother, but that’s difficult too, because I truly don’t think she realizes the extent to which her inaction hurt me. But she took it upon herself to say “I’m sorry” and mean it. This is something my father didn’t do, even in his last days. I don’t know if I CAN build a healthy relationship with my mother because she isn’t a healthy person, but she thinks she is.
It feels to me as though this may be the case with William and his daughter. He really has to KNOW what he is sorry for. He has to be the one to approach his daughter, and realize that his daughter may not be ready or willing to hear what he has to say. And both you, Feeling Helpless, and William have to be prepared for either outcome. You can’t hold it against her either way, because as much as William was hurt by that marriage, his daughter was the most hurt because she had it from both sides. Not to mention, she’s their child. The responsibility of building and maintaining a parent-child relationship, even between adults, always rests heavier on the parent’s side, especially in a case like this. That’s the nature of it. William is still the father, she’s still the daughter. He has to, for once, BE the father and hold his hand out to his daughter. It’s her decision whether to take it.
“How worthless, how weak, how vanquished, how hollow it is to have a father who exists but cannot reach, who says but will not be, who thinks but doesn’t dare, who plays and plays and plays, but only, always, forever in the minor key. We sing the song of parenthood in only the major notes. Were you there? Did you love full-throttle? Did you fix it after you fucked it up?”
This is true in life as a whole, not just parenting. The hardest things mean the most which is why it’s worth getting up and trying again when we fail. I agree with Michael about not hoarding anger and bitterness. I don’t know if an absence of anger is the result, though. Sometimes it is a moderated anger, something that can exist and engaged with but doesn’t take up the whole room…
My father left me when I was nine years old. I didn’t have a relationship with him until after I left my mother’s house. We’ll never be a parent and child, and there are days when I sob and mourn my lack of parental figures. There are days when I feel deprived and cheated, when I look at his teenage stepchildren and the relationship he has with them, the father he never was to me, and I am so angry and hurt I could spit.
But I rebuilt our relationship. It took time and effort and I couldn’t have done it sooner than I did. Today, we are good friends, and I am so glad to have a friend like my father in my life.
He suffers from a variety of health problems, many the result of his addictions in his “previous life,” and I realized there was so much I wanted to say to him, and if I had never gotten the chance, I couldn’t imagine what his funeral would be like, standing there with his second wife and second family, watching the man I loved so much, who loved me but could never say it, being lowered into the ground.
That image was enough for me, but it couldn’t have happened before I was ready.
It was mentioned that William’s daughter won’t respond to him, but it’s not really specified what he has tried to do. In therapy, perhaps he can work out a good way to approach her and ask for her forgiveness. For someone who is not good dealing at feelings, it may be helpful to write a letter with a therapist. If I were the daughter, I would not want the “girlfriend” to be the one writing this with him. It’s his relationship to heal, and maybe he just doesn’t have the tools to figure out how to proceed, but a therapist could help. It is a tough thing to do, and no one could really do it on his behalf, as Sugar has made clear. Everyone seems to be on the same page with this one. As my mom just told me recently, you can’t just walk into a family and try to fix a problematic family dynamic. Those patterns are longstanding, and it’s only for the involved parties to work on. But she can support and encourage William in trying to be a different father, while letting go of her feeling of responsibility for healing his pain. She sounds like a kind person, and I wish her happiness.
Sugar –
You always seem to nail it, don’t you?
While my father was a horrific person (I am an incest survivor), in my eyes my failed parent was my mother. Because she was what I perceived as weak, I became a victim of abuse in my own home when I was only a small child.
My mother and I were estranged for more than 5 years after I insisted, with the help of a fabulous therapist, that we talk about what happened in that house. She was unable to do so, and so I cut off all contact from her and the rest of my family (my father was already dead at this point). In those 5 years apart, with a lot of therapy and a lot of support on my partner’s part, I was able to work through all of the anger, resentment and shame that I had carried for a lifetime. And still I waited for my mother to work up the courage to speak to me and say the words I needed to hear to be able to heal…”I’m sorry for what I allowed to happen to you.”
A year before my mother became terminally ill she sent me a note in the mail asking to speak to me. When I called she said she was ready to take responsibility for her inaction. She apologized for not protecting me, and that’s when the flood gates opened. We cried for almost an hour on the phone but when it was over I felt as though the weight of the world was off of my shoulders.
It’s strange, but the parent I should have hated the most, my father, had always had my pity but very little of my anger. He was sick and I was his victim, and neither time nor space could change what happened, and so I forgave him his actions because he was so inconsequential to me. All of my anger, confusion, feelings of betrayal and hatred were focused on my mother – the one person in the world who was supposed to protect me from the monster. She was the one who taught me to believe that the world would always be an unsafe place for a girl like me. If my mother didn’t love me enough to protect me, what worth did I have?
As my mother lay dying in her hospital bed, her hospice worker told us that she should have passed away by now, but there must be something holding her here – something that was unfinished business for her. So while my sister left the room to get a cup of coffee, I held my mother’s hand and stroked her hair, and sang her one of her favorite songs. She was in and out of a coma for most of the day so I wasn’t sure she could hear me. I took a deep breath and then leaned in closely and whispered in her ear “Mom, it’s okay to let go. We love you and we’ll always remember you. And mom, I forgive you.”
As soon as the last word was spoken, my mother took a deep breath in and gently passed away.
I gave my mother a final gift, a gift that allowed her to pass on with some semblance of closure around an issue that had divided us for years. And my mother’s gift to me was learning the power of forgiveness and having an opportunity to offer it – with a full heart.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. Throughout much of my early adulthood, my stepmother contacted me periodically to try to goad me into calling my long-gone father to “catch up.” My unapologetic, mother-blaming father (and stepmother, too). For the very reasons Sugar so beautifully elucidates, each of these messages prompted weeks of uncertainty and grief. Please, Helpless, stay out of this relationship until/unless there’s a relationship to take part in.
@Vivien – wow. I could have written the same first sentence you did. Exactly the same. And I know the pain of watching my family cluster around the abuser and validate him as a victim while shunning me. So, please know that what I’m about to say is not coming from judgement – I’ve been where you are and I don’t condemn you or minimize your pain at all. Here’s the thing – forgiveness is not condoning the wrong or giving up the truth and reality of your past. Just the opposite. Forgiveness puts all the power into your hands as the wronged party. It gives you the power to say, “What you did was WRONG! It was evil and it hurt me. And now I will let it go. I will wipe out the debt between us, because you cannot pay it. I forgive you, so that I can be free.” (Notice I didn’t say forget.) Hanging on to your anger feels powerful – believe me, there were years when anger was the only thing strong enough to get me out of bed. But eventually your anger will eat you from the inside out and you will find that your Dad still has all the power because you’re giving it to him. You cannot get your Dad to undo what he did. You can’t make the past unreal and, as you know, you can’t make it not matter. But you can be healed and happy. You can reach a point where you remember your Dad without the impotent rage that comes from knowing you can’t punish him the way he deserves. You can turn all those reasons to be bitter (and you do have real reasons) into beauty by forgiving the person who hurt you. Don’t forgive the way your family wants you to forgive – by minimizing reality. Forgive like a god – like someone so powerful, so rich inside that you can be merciful to those who completely don’t deserve it and walk away all the richer for it.
I can understand the sentiments of Feeling Helpless on the Sidelines. My boyfriend is one of the damaged children and I can see the impact it’s had (and continues to have) on his life into his 30s. Sometimes when I see his parents, I want to shake them and scream at them and tell them to love their awesome son and tell him they are sorry for fucking up. Because that’s all he wants to hear. He keeps giving them an audience, and they never say they’re sorry. But I never say anything to them because it isn’t my responsibility to fix his problems. All I can do is love him, and so I do.
Wow! Yes, Sugar, you nailed it exactly! Helpless, take Sugar’s advice and stay out of this one. Daughters need to hear from their fathers only. We need them to stand up, show up, redeem themselves, be consistent, and to fucking MOVE on that love they keep saying they have for us. If they are in fear, they aren’t loving. If they are afraid, they’re putting themselves before the love of anyone else. I’ve gotten to the point where I think half of them use fear for a sympathy card. Get over it.
I’ve had it up to here with self absorbed fathers who expect everyone to “understand” them, and all their reasons and justifications for not owning up. The longer they wait the deeper they dig the hole. If they only knew how long a daughter will hold the door open for them in her heart…the love that is waiting for them. If they just tried!
My biological father and stepfather, and now my daughter’s father, have completely killed any and all respect I may have had for them. And once you’ve lost a woman’s respect, it’s pretty much over. When it gets to the point where my step father’s first response to the joyous news of his grandaughter being pregnant, “Great. Just another family member who won’t keep in touch with me.” (This from a man who expects his children to carry the relationship for him, and uses my mother as the go between for info, instead of coming straight to us…) Mmmmkay then…you go pout over there. And then my ex’s response to the news when his daughter called him..”Oh great, I’ll let my wife know.” Like it was some extended family member or friend doing the calling. But then, he’s another one who used his wife to carry the relationship for him and his daughter, then wonders why his relationship isn’t better with his daughter.
Yeah, deal killers. Done.
@nancyr and julesarose
I think your words are very powerful. They are raw, in different ways. And they are part of this mess that this whole response became about… bigger than a girlfriend’s question. Sugar and everyone here is writing about the should-be sacred space of a child, of parents who should protect their children.
If I ever have children I hope to God I will be able to live up these words:
“We sing the song of parenthood in only the major notes. Were you there? Did you love full-throttle? Did you fix it after you fucked it up?”
ps. julesarose you remind me of my Mom. Thank you to all Mom’s who were brave enough to be “crazy bitches”.
What I really love about Sugar’s columns is the interplay between her wisdom and the collective wisdom of her readers. Life is so messy, loved ones. The tangled webs we all weave are interconnected to the tangled webs of our parents and the webs we are passing on to our children. I have yet to meet someone who has managed to extricate themselves from the mess and launch their child fetter free into the world. Any anger you hold in you has all the effects wise Micheal articulates. The anger is also radioactive and effects your child. I by no means claim to have all the answers. Everyone is playing their own improvised jazz solo. I actually have known someone who had a happy resolution because of a caring stepparent. Every circumstance is different. I do think that all of you thinking, caring people deserve to de-tangle as much of your carry-over parent problems. No one should carry fear, guilt or anger around inside them. You do not need to forgive someone when you acknowledge that they are sorry. You owe that sorry to yourself. And you owe it to yourself NOT to expect too much of it. Sometimes you need to desensitize yourself to them. Sometimes you need to keep yourself at arm’s length from them. You need to find the comfort zone that allows you to separate from them in a natural way. The most important thing is to NOT pass it on. Listening to the rantings of an angry parent about THEIR failed parent produced a profound insecurity in my childhood. Think about it and figure out what you need to do for yourself & those you love.
@The Letter Writer: I had the absent dad who left me with the schizophrenic mom and created a new life for himself with a girlfriend. The girlfriend was always the one who reached out to me, because my father–like your William–was weak and scared. I hated her for that, although she was (and is)a lovely, albeit very codependent, woman. But I needed my father to get (and stay) sorry for leaving me behind to save himself. He couldn’t. She pushed him and pushed him (I’m willing to bet in a very similar way to what you’re doing), and his attempts to rise to the occasion of apology were always furtive and defensive. It was so much worse than nothing at all.
I get a weird feeling when I look at the timeline you describe. He divorced his wife when his daughter graduated high school, and it sounds like you started dating him shortly thereafter. He was–in your words–emotionally abusive at the end of the marriage. So, where did all the recovery come in, and why wasn’t the daughter participating in the therapeutic process, too? Also, um, why would there be state-mandated child support deducted from his paycheck if he was willing to pay, especially if the daughter was 18 at the time of divorce?
And I guess I’m asking all these questions not for you to answer, at least not to me, but to yourself. It seems like the story you’re telling isn’t really the story you’re living. You’re saying a lot between the lines, especially in the letter in the comments. You know that Sugar doesn’t comment on comments, right? That makes me sad in this instance, because I bet she’d have something meaningful to say.
i agree with emma b. william sounds like a blamer. “feeling helpless” sounds like she’s making excuses for him, or believing the ones he’s fed her.
Oh, Sugar. I was also facebook friended by my absentee/wife-and-child-abusing/refuses to take responsibility father. I actually saw him in town the other week at the store with a new wife and baby. I had no idea he was living in the area. I still find myself looking over my own shoulder in case I see him again.
I ended up deleting my facebook.
Thank you for your gut-wrenching, soul saving advice. It is amazing to find out how un-alone we really are.
Sugar, you cut me to the bone and leave me raw. How can I ignore what looks like a play by play letter from my own family? …I can’t.
Thank you for this! Amen!
You nailed it, Sugar, once again.
I’ve typed and deleted the story of my personal experience a dozen times. In reality, the details (my details) don’t matter.
If William wants to reconcile with his daughter, he needs to handle it himself. Anything else adds further insult to the injury already done.
I understand that he’s fearful. It’s an appropriate feeling given the circumstances. But, asking or expecting his daughter to make this ‘easy on him’ is unfair in the worst possible way.
He inflicted the damage on her. Asking her to put his feelings above hers, yet again, is unconscionable – even if he’s not the one asking her to do it.
@Shanna — Yes, I do know that Sugar doesn’t comment on comments; I didn’t expect her to. I felt that part of my letter had been unclear, and for that reason, somewhat inaccurate.
In the state where I live, child support is state-mandated until a child is 21, if that child is going to college full-time, as was the case in this instance. In this state, child support and alimony are almost always processed as wage garnishments, partly to keep an accurate accounting of what’s been paid; the willingness of the paying party doesn’t enter into it. I started seeing William about two years after he was divorced, and he began therapy before he and his wife were separated — they had been in couples counseling together, and he continued individually with that same counselor both before and after the separation, through the process of the divorce, and for about a year after the divorce. His daughter has declined more than one invitation to attend joint therapy.
I realize that to the majority of readers here, I seem codependent and extremely blind and foolish. That’s okay, and I understand why. I have had those same reservations myself. My own therapist, however, who knows the full details of the situation…there is so much more here than I am at liberty to disclose, and even if I were, it would take forever…counseled me to be patient and compassionate. This is a therapist who has a “three strikes and he’s out” method of dealing with relationship issues, so her advice to wait, and support, is interesting to me. My letter to Sugar, which I never in a million years expected her to actually answer, was more a desire, I think, for someone to tell me to sit down and shut the fuck up, which is what she did. I like to take action. I will often take the wrong action rather than wait for things to evolve in their own time. I very much appreciate the wake-up slap from Sugar. I haven’t pushed William to do anything, nor will I … but I will continue to talk to him about the situation, and help him to see that he can make different choices.
I see a great many very hurt and very angry people in this comment thread, and also a lot of projection, which is to be expected. There’s nothing I can say that will make me seem less foolish or delusional, and there’s nothing outside of a book-length manuscript that would adequately describe the nuances of this situation. But details aside, the fact remains: yes, William needs to step up to the plate. And the other fact remains that I think he will do so, given support. Not a kick in the ass that moves him forward with my kinetic energy, but support. Is he weak and scared? Yes. Is that contemptible? Maybe…but there are places where I’ve been pretty weak and scared myself, and I know how I’ve managed to jump a couple of chasms I thought I couldn’t get across. It wasn’t therapy that was the most helpful…it was the loving support of people who believed I could be a better version of myself — not people who wanted to change me, but people who wanted to show me the next landmark road sign on the path I was already awkwardly attempting to travel.
The marks of codependency, in my experience, are staying even when nothing changes, and not being willing to leave when clearly set boundaries are crossed. Slow but steady change has been my experience of William in this relationship. My feeling is that the lesson for me here is to back off and support the process he’s in, rather than being impatient and directing and forcing something to happen. And that was my question to Sugar: would this be a positive risk, or an unforgivable interference? Her answer was a good one. In the course of exploring that question, another one seems to have arisen, regarding whether William is kind of a shitty human being. That’s natural enough, I suppose, but it’s not the question I was asking…and it’s a question that can really be answered only with full knowledge of the situation at hand.
NB: I’m not suggesting that Sugar raised the secondary question; I was referring to the comment thread. I found Sugar’s response to be quite even-handed, with a generous measure of benefit of the doubt regarding what I have experienced to be true.
Dear Letter Writer,
I actually do respond to comments in one situation: when the person who wrote me the letter comments here. I so appreciate your perceptive response to what I wrote. I truly admire the intelligence and consideration with which you’ve grappled with this important question and I’m glad you clarified what you felt you needed to in your comments regarding William. I understand completely that I don’t have the full story in any given letter and I hope you don’t feel too distressed about any misperceptions I had.
With every column I write, I am mindful of what an intense experience it must be to see your letter published here–to not only have to endure what I have to say in response to it (even though you asked for it), but also to hear what others have to say. That you have handled this with such open-hearted grace tells us all a lot about your strength and your wisdom. As is evident here–both in my letter and these comments–so many of us have had to confront these issues in our own lives, as children, as parents, and as step-parents. All of us bring our stories with us when we offer our insight about yours. It’s a gift, but it can be a heavy one to bear at times. As in everything, you must listen to only the voices that speak to you. I hope you can read all that’s written here and bring it forward into your life and this question you posed to me in a way that nurtures you.
Thank you for writing to me. Your letter allowed us to have a conversation that touched so many people. My best to you and William and his daughter, now and always.
With respect,
Sugar
Thank you, Sugar — and your response didn’t distress me at all; it was very fair, and very gracious, while also being the very useful cold-water-wakeup I needed.
As well as being an advice column, this column is very much a kind of group therapy session, I think. It’s sobering and heartbreaking to see that generally speaking, people have little reason to believe that good people can be broken and trying to heal, especially fathers. Fathers have a lot to answer for in our society, it seems … they’ve betrayed and hurt and wounded and just about destroyed so many innocent people that there’s almost no room for any other interpretation.
I know it is unusual for the writer of the letter to respond to comments in the way I’ve done, but there is a reason why I did. Most of the comments show that William and I are — perfectly understandably — showing up for people as archetypal stand-ins for the abandoning father and the codependent, needy woman he suckers in next. So many incorrect assumptions have been put into this situation by readers, (partly due to my letter not going into a lot of detail)including: that William blames his ex for everything (he doesn’t), that he instigated the divorce (he didn’t), that I started seeing him either during or shortly after the divorce (I didn’t), and that I want things to be easy between William and his daughter (I don’t — I want her to have the chance to rip him a new asshole if that’s what she feels like doing, but unless she responds someday to his invitations to get together, that’ll be difficult to achieve).
All of those assumptions are okay, but they’re not the reality of who we are, or what we’re doing. If we’re going to be stand-in archetypes, I’d like to have the chance to be a positive example as well as a negative one. It’s maybe more comfortable for readers to cast us as the prototypical father and his new girlfriend, because the possibility that we’re not those people…that maybe we’re actually people who are in fact living with some integrity, trying to get to our next level of being better, and getting lost or falling down sometimes and trying to get back up…that’s more of a loss for those who never experienced that from a parent. But there’s more hope for the world at large that way, if we are in fact who I say we are. And that’s why I’ve chosen to correct some of the misapprehensions in the comment thread: not because I’m defensive (though I would be disingenuous if didn’t admit that some of them really pissed me off) but because there’s a different potential takeaway here that might be possible, and it’s a better one than “here’s another example of how everybody gets screwed over in the same way I was screwed over.” It’s more along the lines of hey…here are some people who are trying. And failing. And trying again. And maybe failing again, but still trying. Actually trying, not just lip-service trying. And one of the ways I was thankfully circumvented from trying was by trying to help too much in a way that wouldn’t have been good.
Anyway — that’s what I wanted to say, not to Sugar, but in general: that if we are who I say we are, that’s a better thing for the world. I hope that possibility can be allowed to exist alongside the possibility that we’re … just that negative example.
This William fellow works this situation over and over again, every single day. If he is waiting for the “right opportunity”, then trust that he will know, and be brave enough when it comes to face himself and overcome.
He’s lucky to a have a partner who cares so much. He will need your help, before it’s all said and done. Keep
him talking about his thoughts, keep him putting his emotions on the subject out of himself. Put him in the
path of vulnerable. Remind him that little steps make miles, that skipping steps is just like standing still in
an evolving universe – just like moving backwards.
Peace.
Sweet Sugar & Ms. Feeling (Helpless, I think not so much) –
Thanks for this.
Your stories (and the Apocrypha of these comments), as always, help me look at my own suffering (and my own attempts to give meaning to the things that I have done which I know have caused suffering) with a new perspective.
I am very far from my own father and don’t think that distance serves either of us. I have worked to rid myself of the Gruesome Dragons which took up space in my heart for my old man – which is good work whether he ever arrives there or not.
Mostly, whether William’s daughter ever allows him into her heart or not, I believe (“Mr. Endless Naivete”, the prophet / BioPhD Duffy used to call me) he there is comfort to be found in the love of Ms. Feeling. (And in knowing that he lives in a world with Sugar. That alone makes me happy.)
Hugs ‘n’ stuff. And, of course, I love you.
@The Letter Writer: You don’t seem blind or foolish to me. You seem articulate and intelligent and open-minded. Codependent, yeah, I guess, but I mean it without pejorative, and I’m talking about your original dilemma, the desire to intervene and “fix” a situation that isn’t yours to fix. I do that all the fucking time, or think about doing it all the time, or work hard to not do it, at least some of the time. With people I love and sometimes with random people I don’t even know. (e.g. me, to the mail-lady: “Oh, honey, you need to get a wider strap for that bag. You’re going to hurt your shoulder.” WTF? Butt out, Shanna.) And for SURE, I spew a vomitous stream of daddy projection over anything that crosses my path with a whiff of abandonment.
If I’m one of the people whose comments pissed you off, I’m so sorry. Ugh, that sounds alarmingly close to one of my biggest apology pet peeves, when people lead with “IF I hurt your feelings…” Again, not my intention, but you didn’t specify and I don’t want to assume. Jesus,for a writer, my comments can be pretty inarticulate. I’m so glad that you got what you wanted from Sugar.
I’ve encouraged him to e-mail or text his daughter a couple of times a week, with no expectation of a reply; just to send it out there that he’s thinking of her, what reminds him of her during the day, how he feels about her…”
A huge mistake. Disembodied emails or texts with no previous airing of the past and his part in it will come across as cowardly, weasely, and dishonest. Do the difficult work first (a long letter – and not by email, if possible, but something that can be held in the hand), and ask for permission to remain in contact.
Also – Nancyr – that story about your mother in hospice was so beautiful – thank you for sharing it.
Sorry, above comment should have had this first line:
From the original letter writer:
(and was missing the opening quotation mark)
Sarah:
Thank you for your comment. You helped me reframe the situation (and the concept of forgiveness). It may very well be that I’m not in a place where I CAN forgive. I’ve never allowed myself to really be angry at either of my parents until I spoke to my father that last time, and I think I need to work through that anger before I can forgive anybody.
I can accept the concept of forgiveness as letting go of the anger and hurt and bitterness. I too hope that I can do that in order to build a better relationship with my mother and myself. Thank you, again, for making me think.
Like many of the others here, I too have a story about an awful father. To tell the whole story would take a novel (or a series of them) and is literally so ridiculous that people often think I am exaggerating. Unfortunately, I am not. I used to worship my daddy, but now I hate the person he is while still loving the father I used to think he was.
And that is what I want to share with the Letter Writer. I, like William’s daughter, am in my early twenties and have no desire to be in contact with my father or have him in my life. His wife, unlike you, will NEVER encourage him to contact me, and that is alright with me. But every time my dad sends me a text (usually once every three months or so), I respond. It is usually a short response, and I never give him any real information about my life (because he WILL use it against me or my siblings or my mother [especially my mother]). But I still respond.
I still listen to the song I wanted have playing when I danced with him at my wedding, and I try not to cry because I feel silly grieving for a relationship with a man who so obviously does not care about me. But I still do. And I tell myself that I will not invite him to my wedding or to see my children, but I know I would. If he apologized, truly apologized (not the bullshit “I’m sorry your feelings were hurt” crap I’ve gotten in the past), I would open contact with him in a second. It would not be a deep relationship, and I certainly would not trust him for a very long time, but I would still give him that chance. Because I can’t not. I so wish for a daddy who would love me the way I once thought he did and be proud of me the way I once thought he was.
It sounds like William is the exact opposite of my father in that he was willing (and eager) to enter therapy and address his problems. He obviously found a wonderful, kind, and intelligent partner (again, so unlike my father). He wants to reestablish contact, but is scared to do so. And that’s okay. She will know if he is not ready, and will not react well. But when he is, I have faith that she will be like I would and give him that chance. It may take time, it may be hard and painful, and they may never have a great relationship. But if she is anything like me, she will give him the chance to apologize, and will accept that apology if it is real and thorough. And I hope, for her sake and from the perspective of a girl very much like her, that he does give her that apology. Because even if I can’t have a dad who fixes his mistakes, she deserves to have one. And she deserves to be able to have a relationship with you, as well, because you sound like exactly the kind of step-parent every child of divorce deserves to have.
And Sugar, your response was so painful for me in so many ways, but also exactly what I needed to read right now. Thank you for your wonderful words. Somehow, without knowing me or ever hearing from me, you always know exactly what to say to break open the infected wounds that need to heal. And that sounds awful, and it is, but it is also so wonderful. Some truths are universal, and you convey them in such a beautiful way. Thank you for everything you do.
My stepfather (I call him dad, we both hate “step-parent”.) is heartbroken about the loss of a relationship with his biological daughter. He lives abroad so I speak to him about once a week by phone, visit once or twice a year and always send a gift on his birthday and on father’s day. He tells me on Christmas, father’s day and his birthday how sad he is not to have his biological daughter to share these days with, how much he wishes she would call him to talk to him, and how he has “given up” being the one to always call her, and how frustrating it is that she only contacts him when she needs money.
And I nod, and smile, and hug him sympathetically, and inside I rage at him for being such a coward. I want to shout at him for all the things he’s not doing.
She was nine when you left, I want to say. You tell me often how messed up her mum is, and how you had to leave, but you forget that when you left, you left your daughter with this messed-up woman. Alone.
You tell me how her mother always made visits hard for you, demanding so much in court from you and giving nothing back, no visits even though she was required to. But I do not recall one single day on which you went to court to enforce your rights.
You tell me that you think she has taken her mother’s side, that her mother told her a biased story about the break-up, that she believes you left her for another family – our family – although you didn’t even meet us for many years. But you have never stopped to sit with her and communicate your story. I suspect, because you know in your heart that you never fought as hard as you should have.
You want her to call you “just because”. You want her to wish you a happy fathers day and tell you that she loves you. But why should she be the one to mend her broken heart alone? Perhaps she needs your apology – and your admission of guilt – before she can begin that process.
You tell me all the things in your secret heart; all the pain and loss. You tell me how you secretly planned to invite her to come and live with you abroad when you moved. But you never told her these things. And by the time you finally moved abroad she was a young woman, attending college and with friends and a life of her own, and would never have been able to leave. I think, in your heart of hearts, you knew your dream was impossible. So you made sure that she would be the one to say no. You made sure it wouldn’t ever need to be your fault she didn’t come with you.
You tell me how much you love her, but you never tell her that. Perhaps you should start.
But I never tell you these things. I know all too well that you wouldn’t listen, only rage at me for my unfairness, and we would only damage our own relationship with each other. And so I remain silent. I guess you have what you really want; a daughter that will do the work, and always put your feelings first. A daughter that never had a father of her own, and who will not risk losing the one she has found. A coward, just like you.
@V: Wow, that’s a powerful story, well-told. Sometimes parents have good reasons for leaving but to the child left behind they have been abandoned. The parent who left has to start with the impact of their leaving and save the reasons, good or bad, for later. Many folks want to skip that step because it’s the most uncomfortable but it is also the most necessary.
@ Miriam —
Thank you so much for that input. In trying to figure out how to help William break the communication barrier with his daughter, I was looking at it from my own perspective with my own father (from whom I am entirely estranged myself) who really pissed me off by making an effort only on “special occasions” — holidays, birthdays, etc. It was like he had no interest in me on a day to day basis, so that’s what I was thinking with the suggestion to check in…that maybe if he kept showing up, she’d be more willing to believe that he really did care and that he does want to be in personal contact with her, and maybe from there they could get to the point of airing the past. For me, airing the past would have seemed weird without expressing day to day interest first, but I’m the first to admit that my mind doesn’t always work the way most people’s do. So I see what you’re saying, and it’s an excellent point, which I appreciate your having taken the time to share. I couldn’t agree more about the letter; it would have to be by e-mail because she keeps moving and not telling him where she lives, so there’s not a reliable mailing address. But that would, I think, be better than nothing.
@ Ell — Thank you so much for sharing your perspective, and for your kindness. I appreciate your generosity in the face of your own grief. One thing that’s helped me, in my own journey with emotionally abandoning parents, is the gradual knowledge that sometimes other people step in to show up in the ways the people who should have, couldn’t. This never replaces the loss of that primary relationship that shouldn’t be broken; it can’t. But there’s a luminous grace to the kaleidoscope of small father-pieces, and small mother-pieces, that others may drop into that blank space where a mother or a father should be. I hope that you, and everyone who is wounded in this way, will be given these facets of love to keep. We can all parent each other a little, if we’re willing.
“We can all parent each other a little, if we’re willing.” Oh man, I want that painted on the ceiling over my bed, so I can wake up to it every morning. Whatever nasty, bitter things we’ve lived through, that can’t be changed retroactively no matter how much we want it, we can start right now to give each other some sweetness. That, we can do. There is more than one way to heal.
I had to re-check the initial letter to be sure it wasn’t my own father’s girlfriend. I see a lot of people, and Sugar too, saying “If the right words were said, the right apology, then…” but I’m also pretty sure it would involve a whole lot more than the right words or apology for me. Simply, it would take months or years to rebuild trust because while it’s one thing to be betrayed in some way by someone close to you, it’s entirely another when that person is your parent. Perhaps there is no worse betrayal. And in taking months or years to build up trust, my father would also show change of character and a new commitment. As it is, this is not likely to happen.
I speak as a 20-something daughter who has asked my father again and again and again not to be in touch with me. He still calls about once a month and each time he further demonstrates a complete lack of awareness or willingness to put my needs, boundaries, feelings, thoughts, requests, etc. first. What I noticed in the letter is that it’s really all about William’s needs and wants and how painful it is to him. So when the letter writer wants to be in touch with the daughter to let her know how much William loves her, it’s still not about the daughter but about William. William’s daughter knows her father loves her (somewhere deep down) but the only way to make that feeling *present* and true and genuine is to love her enough to allow her to determine the course of the relationship.
Thank you so much for this. As I read the letter, I was taken back to my own experience with a too-long absent father who reached out finally in my 29th year to say he regrets the past and that he longs for a relationship with me. When I responded with caution, “Really? Are you sure? Because I’m not willing to be fooled by you again.” I was hit with an email from his wife, blaming me and my mother for our lack of relationship. Needless to say, it didn’t sit well.
“To redeem himself by being the man who lives out his healing transformation by becoming the father he failed to be before. By doing it, no excuses, and doing it right.” THIS IS SO RIGHT ON. Men, stop asking for permission to be a parent and start showing up. The only way to show that you’ve changed is to prove it. Otherwise, it’s just more empty words and nothing.
Oh Sugar. I read your column every week (though sometimes late) and I never comment, even though you always punch me in the gut. But this week’s column really struck a nerve and had me sobbing. Thank you so much.
Dear All – Tank you. I could write for days about my father abandoning ship when i was 4 and 7. And then, worse, rejecting me – literally, telling me so on the phone – when i was 10 years old, and never calling back, and returning my mail. It’s crazy, to see it in black and white.
And then when i was 13 I wrote a five-page poem about it, where I poured it all out after 3 years of conspiratorial silence. And then I had the balls and the ovaries and the nerve and the spirit to pick up the goddam phone and call up this ghost.
And then how we rebuilt a relationship from there. And how I writhed my anger at him from time to time. And how he apologized, and cried in shame. And how he became a present, available father to me, and more – a kindred spirit, which is lucky, unusual even, to find with one’s parent. And how we had a wonderful, rich time and a special connection, one not needing words, that I will not be able to replace.
And then, 11 years after that fateful phone call, when he told me he was sick with cancer, I writhed with anger again. Flashing on and off for the next 18 months, until he shocked me and died.
And how he needed me to take care of him. And how my immediate thought was “how dare you? how dare you ask me to take care of you after you refused to take care of me when i most needed it.” And how I helped care for him, but I didn’t give to him the way I now wish I could have. Partially because I was simply too young and did not understand how much he would die, and partially because this hurt anger writhed.
I realized that despite all the healing and development of our relationship, I had an unspoken contract in the recesses of my heart: We are good, loving friends; you are my mentor and even my dad now. But when I was just a child, needing a loving parent most, you weren’t there. So I owe you *nothing.*
Fortunately we had a good enough relationship by then that I wanted – and did – give him something. But it was given with a twinge of pain always, not with ease.
And then he left again – much much much too early.
I will always love you dad. Thank you for finally showing up and growing up. You may not have found complete success before you lost your life, in some of your other ventures. But as a father you finally showed up to the race, and imperfectly ran it. The only way to run it. And to this day, I am working through the utter pain of that phone call from you when I was 10 years old. But what matters most is that you finally reversed course.
In a week I will mark 10 years since you passed, very imperfectly.
I don’t know I missed this one before. So well said, of course. This reminds me of a time about ten years ago when my father, came to visit me (after most of a lifetime of being totally checked out) and his girlfriend sent along a card or a gift, I can’t remember, but with it a little note that said, “I wish you could heal your relationship with your father. That would be so nice.” I was floored by her audacity in saying that. She wanted ME to just decide to heal it?
I am pregnant now and my baby will not have a father, only a donor. I pray that he won’t be angry at me for that, or angry at my (known) donor for not being something that he never signed up to be.
This father anger is so tricky. Makes me want to go read that Sherman Alexie poem, How Do We Forgive Our Fathers….
Dear Sugar,
I’m going to disagree with you on this one. We all mature at different rates. Some never escape adolescence. In many cases the adult children are far more mature, emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually, than their parent.
The wounded part of us, the part that needs healing and expression, calls us to encounter our parent. This is very hard to do if one is wounded.
In most cases, our parent will continue to disappoint, but one can always hope. The encounter will be productive one way or another.
I’m reminded of William Shakespeare’s famous lines from the Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Peace to you Sugar
Fuck. Yes.
Dear Dick:
I don’t think Sugar is saying that William’s daughter shouldn’t give him a chance, but rather that William has to be the one to ask for it, not his partner.
And that is true and real and good advice.
Also, I don’t agree that encounters with estranged parents are invariably productive.
This one made me cry. I would recommend that your readers go online and learn as much as they can about personality disorders. Many of these parents sound like they have borderline or narcissistic or other personality disorders. I don’t know if that is the case or not but healthy parents do not ignore or abuse their children. No excuses. If they have some major personality flaw then they will have it for the rest of their lives. This isn’t about mental illness which can be medicated. It is about the coming together of genes and environment to form a basic personality that is set by adulthood. I am a social worker and I can tell you that there are many people having children they will NEVER be able to parent. Here’s what a person who does not have a phd or an md behind her name but years of experience to go by recommends….. Look at the human debris the person leaves in his/her wake and if there is no mental illness or serious drug/alcohol abuse that seems to leave only basic personalities flaws to accept. The pain in these letters explain so much why children feel they cannot forgive. I say… just accept that this person had nothing to give and that the pain might be great for you but it also means you have it in you to love and he/she did not. I cannot think of a sadder person that one who has no idea what love feels like. I read a book many years ago that had the best ideas on how to come to terms with your childhood. It will make you angry at first but it also will help you move on……your parents got away with it. There. Thatis just such a stark sentence but so true. You cannot redo your childhood. Every time you let the pain get to you they are doing it all over again. Even if they are dead. Do not give them that much power. You were helpless as a kid. Not any longer. Use your adult strength to accept that you drew the short strawe and got a rotten parent but here’s the thing…..this is your one and only life. Do not use another brain cell or another minute of your life letting them get away with it again. They had shit for brains but you don’t….and you have the rest of your life to move on.
I stopped talking to my father when I was 20 years old and started therapy. He was an incredibly abusive presence in my life and in order to heal I had to completely withdraw from him. I saw him again at a family function when I was 36 and still in therapy. My four-year old daughter, whom he had never met, was playing on the swing. By then he was very sick with diabetes brought on by his alcoholism. He was sitting on a chair, his left hand holding his right hand, which had an open sore that would not heal. My daughter jumped down off her swing, skipped over to him, kissed him on the cheek, said “Be better soon,” and went back to her swing. My father’s eyes teared over and he sat in his chair paralyzed with emotion. I stood in front of him. It was his moment to be real and reach out to me. Instead he said something abusive to one of my other siblings and laughed, as he always did, to let us know it was just a joke. Several weeks later he called me. He had been sober for about four weeks. He wanted to know if he had been a bad father. He said, “Everyone’s saying I abused you and did terrible things to you. I didn’t, did I?” A huge part of me wanted to say he hadn’t been that bad, that it was okay, that I was over it and we could now have this great relationship. I also knew I would flush away 16 years of therapy and betray myself in the most profound way if I didn’t speak the truth. So, I took a deep breath and said, “Yes you did abuse me, and you were a terrible father. It’s taken me years to recover. But I forgive you and I love you.” My father started sobbing and hung up the phone. The next day he returned to drinking full tilt and was dead within two weeks. I knew I was healed when I didn’t feel responsible for him returning to his vodka. I knew I was blessed to have arrived at forgiveness after so many years of riding that sorrowful and excruciating wave of parental betrayal. Before his funeral where I was to give his eulogy, I sat on his bed and heard the word “release” whispered in my ear. I didn’t cry at his funeral. The time for tears had ended.
I was so moved just reading this comment thread. I was not a great parent to my older adult son. There was never any guarantee we’d have a good relationship. But we do now. It’s not all blissful, but I accept that because 1) there will always be damage I can’t undo, as much as i wish I could, and 2) no relationship is always the way we’d like it to be. It took me owning up to what I did and especially what I failed to do, letting him know, and being willing to hear, no matter how painful to me, what growing up had been like for him. I had to forgive my own parents and to go through the depths of many “dark nights of the soul” to develop the courage it took to do that, knowing I’d have to live with the results (including being forced to see myself through his eyes), whether they were the ones I wished for or not. I wanted good results so badly, whether I deserved them or not. Yet, at some point I had to take the risk; it was my responsibility, not his – I can never make the past OK and he had the right to dismiss my efforts. I am deeply moved by the degree of hard work and forgiveness on my son’s part; work he also extended to the father he barely knew growing up. He has, by his own initiative, reunified and helped heal estranged parts of our families. Whether you are the parent or the child, know that such grace can happen. Maybe it won’t or can’t in many cases, but doing the hard work of apology and/or forgiveness is still worth it. I would be deeply sad if my son had rejected me, but I would still know, at last, what it is like to live in integrity. However, he honored my willingness to hear his truth and to tell my own, free from excuses and justification. No one is a perfect parent, but I have a feeling he will be a very good one.
@ The Letter Writer:
I am the daughter in a situation not very similar – but similar enough – to this one. If my father’s wife wrote me a letter like this, I would be glad and grateful that she had such a big heart, and that someone so good was in my father’s sorry life…but it would have zero impact on my estrangement from him. It’s his bed to have made, lain in, messed up, and walked away from. Some beds cannot be remade, and sometimes it’s all to the good.
This sounds like a far more volatile situation, though, so I’m gonna agree with Sugar all the way. I just wanted to share what my actual reaction would be. Hope that helps.
I second Sugar’s wise response.
I have a father and a stepmother. I have had little or nothing to do with them for years. (I’m going to skip the details, which are similar to those already posted, and get to my point.) When I did, however, it bothered me tremendously that my father outsourced his job as a parent to his new wife. Even now, I get sporadic emails from the wife. “Your father wants to know what the grandkid wants for his birthday. Your father wonders how you are.”
If my father wanted to know these things badly enough, he would get off his duff and ask me. However noble my stepmother’s intentions may be, I need my father to take responsibility for himself and his current and past actions–big ones, small ones, all the ones in between. I suspect that William’s daughter needs the same thing.
Letter Writer, stand clear. Your motives are good. You see something broken and want to fix it. You sound like a good and loving person. In this case, however, getting involved will complicate the problem.
When William’s desire to mend his relationship with his daughter is stronger than his fear of rejection and bigger than his desire to hide behind excuses, he will reach out to his daughter. Of course, that day might be a week from never. You get to support his process, if you want to, and you get to decide whether or not you’ll stay with a partner who is moving at whatever pace he’s moving. Those are the only decisions that are really yours to make.
If you do decide to continue supporting his process, however, I encourage you to kick the tires. He doesn’t need anyone’s permission to be her father. How hard can he have tried to help pay her college tuition, for instance? She attends an school that routinely sends back checks? Or maybe she attends a school that would cheerfully credit his contribution to the next term’s tuition, and he’s waiting for an okay from her mother that he can put his money in. He doesn’t need the okay to write the damn check already.
Or maybe he’s not ready to have a big conversation, but there’s nothing stopping him from sending a birthday card that says “I’m not ready to have a big conversation, but I’m working on it and in the meantime I want you to know that I love you.” And so forth.
If having a better connection to his daughter is important to him, he needs to start acting like her father. There isn’t going to be an engraved invitation.
I’m so sorry that you had to go through that. I have had similar situations and as you know in this tiny box of comments – way too much to discuss here. But Sugar, I feel your pain. I wish I knew you enough to say fuck off and then swig a shot of whiskey together. Sometimes that just feels best. Hugs.
I cried and then I read the comments and cried some more until i simply had to stop reading comments. This is what my dad is and you just hit the nail on the head.
I have reread this post so many times because I feel like I have to give reasons why I feel so strongly about what children go thru when their parents divorce. Before they can talk children still process everything in their environment including the “contract” between the parents that this is a family that is suppose to stay together. The children have few emotional requirements but they are always based on life being fair. We know that it is not…. but they don’t. How else to describe someone who can believe in Santa or the tooth fairy. The belief that the parents are 100% committed to the contract and to the child is a strong belief in a fragile union. Until about ages 8/9 magical thinking keeps them believing in fairy tales but after that they still believe in their parents’ union. If the divorce is before puberty the child feels helpless and rage begins. It stays under the surface until that first hormone hits. That hormone doesn’t just put hair on a chest or give a girl breasts. It also turns the child outward toward the world but the rage under the surface remains. That is why parents who separate should always maintain homes close to each other and if they left the marriage because they have met someone else they should keep that a SECRET from the child until long after the divorce. When a parent leaves the children always feel left as well. They never “get” the separation. They can’t….their belief system won’t let them, hence the years of anger and the inability to forgive that follow. Do not know if William will ever have the chance to make it up to his child. Even if his wife was difficult he should never have given up on his relationship with his child. Hard tho it might have been the outcome would have been much different if the child had seen her father fighting for his rights. When I was a social worker I often had mothers come to the office asking if they could place their children in foster care until the children calmed down. The children were always between 13 and 15 and out of control. My first question was always “when was the divorce?”. The mothers were so surprised that I knew there had been one. I was responsible for insuring the safety of the children but each time it was just a very angry child who finally felt strong enough to let that rage out and the mother was the east target. Don’t marry and have children if you cannot commit to a lifetime of parenting. Some of these children grow up and divorce as well. After all, the childhoods they had was the only ones they knew so reliving them are likely outcomes. Every person I know who married when they knew they were making a mistake have children who will never completely recover from the damage of the divorces that followed. It just breaks my heart.
This letter gave me chills. I’m the daughter in her early 20s of a man named William. Literally, his name is William. He was emotionally and physically abusive and still is verbally abusive to my mother. He’s gone to therapy. He thinks he has changed, but he still blames my mother for his actions. His wife, who I’ve heard of but never met, could easily have written this letter. I felt anger bottling up in my throat as I imagined her trying to write to me, to convince me how much he has changed. You voiced my resentment in a much more elegant way than I could. If she ever writes to me, maybe I’ll just forward her this.
No one is perfect. But it was a moment of grace when an imperfect father (mine) acknowledged this to his imperfect daughter (me): My dad apologized to me when I was 30, 13 years ago, for not protecting me and my sister better from our fear based manic damaged narcissist mother. They are still married to this day and she’s still bonkers or worse sometimes, but he told me to my face that he was sorry he failed us when we were so young and so vulnerable to her mania and fear. And in doing so he began to build a bridge of understanding and communication between us that has only grown in the years since then. It’s not about perfection so much as it is about acknowledging that we are human, we do sometimes fuck it up, but that we are working toward better every day.
That to me, is a great example of imperfect love. I am grateful for this every day and the depth of my relationship with my father that this act of his lay the groundwork for…
Sugar, I feel like I’m years late to the party. But I had to write to you on this note. Whether you read these or not.
Father’s are the most complex and heartbreaking people out there, and until I fell in love with a boy and the topic of children came up, it was never completely clear to me why that could be. My brother and I spent lifetimes discussing and re-discussing and analyzing and crying over the things our father would say, do, and not do, but everything we ever said only felt like a thesis, without proof, or closure.
Then I met the love of my life. The one who would make my world tilt. We had loved each other for a long time, when the conversation of children came up, it was casual, neither of us wanted them. And then we had the scare. I had never realized how well I knew him until I thought I might be pregnant. I was almost hysterical. I knew he would not be there to support our hypothetical child. I knew his love for me would never be enough for him to commit his life to something he had a part in creating. If I would not abort it, it was my responsibility. I knew all of this without talking to him, and once I did, it was confirmed. He didn’t have to say much, but he was terrified, he is still, in so many ways, a child. And any degree of responsibility terrifies him, he does not have the instinct, of “you do what you have to” that I feel was ingrained in me as a child. But then I spoke with my brother again, us now both being older, and having experienced more life.
He didn’t have to say it either, but I saw the same lack of interest in how his actions affected others. Now maybe I just happen to be close to inconsiderate people, but the more I think about it, the more I have paid attention, it is the women I know who will pick up the pieces around them and walk forward no matter what. It is the women who will fight, get dirty, and throw caution to the wind to do what needs to be done. Women so much less frequently walk away from something important, and are able carry on without looking back. My father, who was not always around when I was young, came back when my younger brother was born, and has tried to be a responsible parent for him. He can’t be. He is terrible at it, but he stays, and I have seen it eat at him year after year until now he is a person I am almost embarrassed to be around. And honestly? I think its because he is a man, who cannot be ultimately responsible for somebody else. This isn’t the closure I was always looking for, but it is much less painful than assuming you just weren’t worth it to somebody you couldn’t have loved more.
I would never call myself a feminist, but in reading this I see that is what I may just come across as. I am just a daughter, hurt by a man, who I used to think was the closest thing to a God that walked on this Earth. And I want to know if anybody else feels the same way as I do.
I had a regular mom and dad in a conventional marrige, whatever that encompasses. A few minutes after my mom died, I closed her eyes and was holding her hand and thinking things at her and my dad told me to hurry up.I was the first person he called, of course, but why? I was sick and hospitalized and when home and better, stopped by his place. He asked when I was going to trim his hedges which I had been doing for some years. I said I didn’t think I could and he asked why. I said I was weak and he asked why. I was 65. My mom never trimmed a hedge or took a car for an oil change in her life. He never called when I was in the hospital or when my husband had surgeries or a heart attack. I feel guilt even though I know I am nothing to him but a person who might do something for him. Once, I wanted to divorce and went to my mom and dad to talk about it. My husband was having an affair.My dad said, “Well, there are two sides to every story.” I didn’t get the divorce.We can never understand men. I wrote a book about why. And one of them being your father is just too fucking complex for a female to ever get her head around. Don’t worry about being a daughter. Just be the you that YOU like best. It makes no difference to them.
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