This started off as just having a little rant in my head, which turned into typing a bit of a rant, then I felt much better so as I don’t have a blog of any sort, I’m posting it here because sometimes it’s a bit if a relief to burst all your feelings out in the open!
So, I’m currently sitting alone in our chalet in the Alps, our last guests have left and I’ve just been mindlessly flicking through random pages of rubbish on the internet, when I came across this article, the headline being ‘growing up without a father can permenently alter the brain, fatherless children are more likely to turn to drugs and deviant behaviour’
This made me angry, and then thoughtful, and then a whole rush of feelings for many different people came to my head that I felt I had to write it down.
So this is an open letter to my Father, my Mother, my brother and sister and anyone else who has been present (or absent) in these very nearly almost 23 years.
I am neither a deviant, nor a drug user, neither am I a female being promiscuous frequently to compensate for the lack of a father in her life, I have not chosen a boyfriend with parental traits, I have not been abused by the male company I keep and I am certainly not love starved.
Although according to this and several other articles this is what I should be.
From barely walking and talking, I have grown up without a father, not because of a noble reason like he died fighting for our country or something like that, I grew up without him, simply because he didn’t want to be there. That is a sentence I don’t think I’ve ever said before, because its hard to acknowledge that someone doesn’t want to be a part of your life, even harder to acknowledge that 50% of the reason you are actually on this planet doesn’t want to be in your life. Your parents are the people that should love you the most in the whole world, and when one doesn’t, yes it’s pretty much the most painful thing, certainly the most painful thing in my life.
What makes up for this however is that even with an absentee father, I have been blessed with one of the most compassionate, beautiful, caring, slightly mad family that would be there for me in the blink of an eye whatever I required.
The most amazing person in this family is undoubtedly my mother, she has 3 children, one with a disability and it’s just not a problem. She holds herself with such dignity and she’s just unfaltering, she’s done the job of two parents and more and I couldn’t love her more if I tried.
She has sat with me anytime I’ve ever had anything to say about my father, and manages to comfort me whilst still not saying a nasty word about him, something I will never understand. Several years ago I was in a bar, in the company of my father which makes me very emotional and nervous, as I have too much to say yet can’t get words out, I text my mum and her reply was simply ‘just remember darling, you’re half me and half him, and you’re all lovely so he can’t be all bad’ how a person can talk like that about a man who left her with nothing but 3 children I will never understand and whilst she may be right about me being 50% her and 50% him, I plan on spending my life striving to be 100% her.
I wrote a letter to my dad in 2nd year of high school, I can’t remember what it said, and I didn’t have his address, on the envelope I wrote his name, his profession and the town I thought he lived in, also a note to the postman to ask him to please find my dad, and well what a postman, the letter was delivered, and a phonecall from my dad in the middle of the night to my mother led to me making a phonecall in the morning, and him being in Shetland fairly soon after. He met my brother and sister for the first time, his children that he had never set eyes on, I remember him being in our house and knowing that it just wasn’t going to go how I envisioned it, my dad was there but I no longer wanted him there, my sister however fell in love and it was lovely to see, after he left they spoke on the phone almost every night, until he just decided to stop. Why? I have no idea, but how a grown man can break a little girls heart like that, tears me to shreds. I can forgive being abandoned, I cannot forgive someone abandoning my sister. Never.
Several years went by until I saw him again, in a pub with other family members, which is also how I’ve seen him every other time since. In this situation I sit there, so many emotions and so many things to say bubbling away unable to get out until that one vodka two many and everything just falls out my mouth usually drunk and incoherent, but now it’s all written down , maybe he’ll read it and things will make sense although he hadn’t accepted my Facebook friend request. Ha.
I haven’t seen him since my 21st and I’m rapidly approaching my 23rd, I was in his town several months ago and got in touch to grab a drink but I was apparently too last minute and he had plans, and that’s fine, at the grand old age of almost 23, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have a biological father and not a dad, it’s taken a long time but I have officially given up on ever having any sort of a relationship with him and I’m ok with it, it doesn’t make me cry anymore, my life is no less without him in it. In a way I’m happy he wasn’t around, my family has so much love for each other that if there was an extra, we wouldn’t have as much to go around.
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