Daddy, What'dja Leave Behind for Me? All in All, It Was Just a Brick in the Wall.

The last time I spoke to my father was August 2002. Since I made the decision to stop speaking to him, all manner of people have pressured me to resume contact with him. The most common reason given is "he's your father," which I do not consider valid. (When my mother offers that reason, I respond by saying, "Who's fault is that? Yours." It's a wonder she hasn't slapped the taste out of my mouth yet.)

My mom and I recently discussed my real reasons for severing contact with my father. He's done a lot of shitty things to me over the years, such as spending my entire childhood berating me about my non-existent weight problems until I developed bulimia, but I can get past most of them because I can see them as his issues. My father grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family with an alcoholic, obese father and a mother with obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested itself as hoarding (classic Southern story). He inherited his mother's mental health issues. I can excuse a lot of his selfishness and critical behavior as manifestations of his own issues that did not have anything to do with me, although they were hurtful and damaging to me as a child. But there are two things he did that I cannot get past.

First, he lied to me about something important. My father worked a lot when I was a child -- every day, usually twelve to fourteen hours per day. I used to ask him why he wasn't home more often, and he snappishly told me that he was putting food on the table and a roof over my head. Since his own father contributed little to the family's financial support, my mother tried to help me understand that it was important to my father to provide for us, but he made me feel like it was my fault that he had to work so much and never had time for us or himself. However, he managed to have an entire affair with the woman who is now my stepmother. Affairs like that are dangerous and hurtful, not just because my father betrayed his wife (my mother) but because he betrayed his children as well. He said he didn't have time for us, but he had time for his mistress. I can't forgive him for making me feel like it was my fault he had to be at work when, in fact, he wasn't at work all the time that he said he was. He was choosing to spend his time with someone more important.

Second, he took a situation that was emphatically and unequivocally about me and made it about him. In 2002, I threatened to kill myself. (It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I was taking some medication that had an unanticipated side effect of making me depressed. I went off of it shortly thereafter and felt much better.) My mother threatened to have me committed, and she took the unusual step of involving my father. My father called me at work and asked me to have lunch with him, but I declined. He left a letter on my windshield in which he droned on for page after page about how ungrateful I am and how awful I am to him and my stepmother (the aforementioned co-affairant). I said I was going to kill myself, and his response was to list my faults.

My father has made various attempts over the years, typically around major holidays, to reestablish some kind of contact. I have always rebuffed those attempts with the exception of the fact that I write him a note of thanks if he sends me a gift (Southern through and through, that's me). My mother did not fully understand my reasons before for avoiding a relationship with my father, and now that she does, she still feels mostly the same way. She thinks my father hurt me very deeply (correct) and that I have built a wall around myself to protect myself from being hurt like that again (correct). However, she thinks that once a wall has been created, I can't decide who it keeps out (my response: "Of course I can. I built it."), and this wall is keeping out too many people (i.e., dudes who aren't loons or duplicitous sleazebags). She urged me to remain open to the possibility of having some kind of relationship with Dad.

What would my relationship with my father look like if I hadn't decided to stop talking to him in 2002? Chances are, it would be perfunctory. My brother and my father talk, but my brother clearly does not treat my father as someone he can rely on emotionally. My mother and I are his primary emotional support network. I imagine my father and I would interact similarly, but probably even less frequently since my brother lives one hour away from our father and I live in another part of the country entirely. Could I handle having even such minimal contact with someone with whom I am so angry? I don't know.

I also don't know whether it is better to build a wall to keep my father out or whether it is better not to have a wall and let him have continued opportunities to hurt me. Much of the pain he inflicted happened when I was much younger (...necessarily, as I stopped talking to him at age 22), and perhaps I would find it easier to stand up to him now. It just seems so exhausting that I would have to do it.

Right now, I'm in sort of a murky middle place on my feelings about it. This represents a dramatic change to how I felt about the situation even a few weeks ago, when I was intractable in my desire to remain estranged from my father. Maybe I just need to stay in this place for a little while to let the pain that he inflicted, the pain that I walled off because it hurt too much, sink in. Maybe I just need to feel raw about things for a little while.