DISOWNED

My mum is crying. It’s an afternoon and we are in the little unit in Dandenong. She was screaming angrily and vanished to her room. I had no idea what was going on, I just knew to stay away.

 

In her fits of anger, she mumbled, ‘He’s a fucking asshole.’

 

Later, when I was older, I would learn that she was upset about a letter she had received. A letter from my father. She held onto that letter for years and hid it in the drawer of her bedside table. I figure it was so she could give it to me when I was old enough to understand what he had done. However, I was never given it. All I had was her regurgitation of what it said mixed with her deep vitriol for him.

The gist of the letter was, ‘I don’t want anything to do with him anymore.’

 

And with that, I was disowned.

 

The story that I have pieced together over the years places the blame for this action square at the feet of my fathers then partner, Anne-Marie. A woman with significant ‘daddy-issues’ that got together with my father when she was too young and he was in his late 20’s.

 

She hated me. In fact, she utterly despised me.

 

Gran recounted the story of the day she kicked me in the face when I was under the kitchen table. Supposedly I bit her. I must have been 4 or 5 and I was playing under the table. She told Gran I had bit her, and Gran told her to tell me off. Instead, Anne-Marie kicked me, her foot sliding off my shoulder and into my face. Gran said I cried. Gran also said she didn’t like Anne-Marie very much.

 

Neither did I.

 

I only recall one moment where I spent time with her. I visited her home with dad. They must have just started seeing each other. The only other time I was around her was if she visited while I was at my Grandparents. Thankfully, my young memories don’t contain many images of her ugly face.

 

However, what I have come to understand, with bits of story, is that Anne-Marie was jealous of me and over time, she came to resent me for what I was. I was everything she couldn’t have with my father; a child with the man she loved.

 

So, her jealousy bred a deep resentment which she used to force my father out of my life. And no matter how any of us tried, her grip over him was so strong that he would rather abandon me than fight for me.

 

The wound of abandonment that his actions delivered provided the fertile ground for all the roots of bitterness and rejection I would grow into adulthood. It was the first stone of many that would cause ripples of chaos throughout my life.

 

And he deserves to know just how much damage he caused.

 

So, this ones for you Dale.

 

It’s funny how I have come to despise Father’s Day. Every year it rolls around, and I am stuck with the feelings of grief and sadness that I don’t have a father, but it’s not because he’s dead, it’s because he chose a life without me. I still can’t help but fantasize about what it would have been like if I had a relationship with you. Would we have come to visit you? Would you have smiled when you saw me pull up the drive? Would we have had a beer and a laugh about the “good ol’ times”? Would we have watched the football and talked about the unfair umpires or the trade season approaching? Could we have had a BBQ or roast dinner, all while smiling and sharing that unspoken love between parent and child?

 

I wonder what it would have been like to be embraced by you; to have had you involved in my life as much as I know other fathers are, or how I imagine they are. I wonder what it would be like to be proud of you and to experience your pride in me. I wonder what having a father to rely on would be like, you know, when you call your dad for a favour and he’d drop everything to help you.

 

I used to get lost in the absent wonderings about the why’s and the what ifs. That can be dangerous because you end up fantasising about the life you never had nor will have. There have been times I imagined a life so much better than what I thought I had, then resented the fact I didn’t have it.

 

In reality, underneath that fantasy is a basic human desire for understanding. Not having the answers to the whys and what ifs contributed to my need to create this alternate version of you. Rather than see Lex Luthor, I made you Clark Kent. The truth is that you would have never been able to live up to the fantasy version of you I created. I wanted a father so bad I imagined a perfection and love so extraordinary that it would have been impossible for anyone to aspire to. I have had no alternative but to determine my own truth about why you are not in my life and that’s why I needed to realise that there is no place for the fantasy version of you in my life.  

 

I wonder what it would be like to make a choice like you did. Could I simply walk away without ever looking back? Could I allow myself to be talked into pretending like my child didn’t exist? I’d like to think I couldn’t but then again, I haven’t walked your life. Perhaps with a specific mix of circumstances and emotions, I could. I know it hasn’t been an easy road for you and even though that provides a small gesture of grace, it doesn’t take away the truth.

 

There have been plenty of men that tried to fill the void of your absence. No. Perhaps it’s more like; there had been plenty of men I looked to, to fill the void. If only they knew how broken and damaged I was. If only they knew the secrets I held, deep in my soul that twisted like a ball of thorns. If only they knew that I was crying out for love – a love you never gave me.

I looked to male figures for guidance, direction and attention, and it strikes me just how important a father is to a child, indeed, just how important it is for males to have an example to lead them. It saddens me to think of all the fatherless (and parentless) children there are in this world, for whatever reason, but I believe firmly, the most difficult thing for a child to come to terms with is the absent parent. At least with death, you know that’s absolute, but with choice comes all the emotional baggage; the doubt, the confusion, the bitterness, the hate. Absent parents are the worst kind. Perhaps that’s why so many of us make up the lie that our missing parent is dead. Death requires no explanation. It’s absolute. It’s definite. You can’t come back from it.

 

I used to tell people you were dead. I would come up with stories to explain your absence from my life and why my mother was a single parent. I wished you were dead, more often than I wished I could see you. I grew tired of explaining it, yet sometimes I liked to see the reaction from people when I told them the truth just to see if they thought you were a cunt too. Sometimes I’d exaggerate it, but I didn’t really need to. The truth is a hard enough pill to swallow.

 

You couldn’t even call. You barely paid for child support and left my mother to fend for herself and raise a child on her own. Your child. I was six when you chose to leave me and you can never deny that’s what you did. You left me and left me alone to fend for myself in a world that was already trying to destroy me. Imagine how a child of six could comprehend that. They can’t. And with your choice came my response, “What did I do wrong?” And the fact is I didn’t do anything wrong, but that doesn’t stop the wound from forming or the roots of abandonment and rejection from growing.  You had a partner that hated me and she twisted and manipulated you into making a choice. I’m sure there was a ‘It’s him or me’ conversation, that, or you’re more hateful than I thought. Perhaps you never really loved me anyway and you did it all of your own accord.

 

As rational as I can be, I always seem to arrive at the same truth. And even though I have seen you a few times since then, I’ve never heard an explanation for why you did it. You did say you never stopped loving me, but how is that possible? Because surely, if you loved me as your son, you would have told your partner to accept you with a child, or not at all. Shouldn’t it have been you saying, ‘Its him and me’?

 

I am at a point where I no longer carry this burden and one day all the thorns will be removed from my soul. I’ve given up trying to piece together a jigsaw without the box. Examining every piece to know where it fits and trying to understand why some pieces won’t fit where I want them to. You left my life in pieces and took away the box. So now I have thrown the pieces away. Its no longer a puzzle I care to build.

 

Because of your abandonment, I suffered extraordinary damage to my psyche which prevented me from developing the necessary skills needed to move through life. You are not responsible for all the things that have happened, and I certainly don’t hold you to account for all of it, but the abandonment literally split me in two and I feel a deep sense of loneliness as if I have no place to belong. I long to feel accepted rather than rejected and it’s this which has caused me the most pain and has led me to seek out acceptance in unhealthy ways.

Instead of feeling confident in myself, I was afraid. Where I should have been care-free, I was  in constant fear that people I loved or trusted would simply leave. So I learned how to sabotage. I learned with time how to destroy anything good before I could be hurt. I learned to build the wall. I learned how to build it high so that no-one could see me. I discovered masks and how to use them. I worked out how to look happy, while being utterly broken behind it. Then I learned that people would stop bothering to try and break down the wall, and that suited me fine, even though I really wanted to be rescued.

 

Thankfully my life is littered with people that I could trust and that rather than tear down my walls, would climb them and sit with me behind them. Some would point out how dark it was behind the wall and it was only then that I could see the truth. The rejection had imprisoned me and I didn’t know how to get out. I didn’t know how to be loved enough to be set free. I didn’t know what was reality and what was a lie I had turned into my own version of the truth. Many people tried to point it out, and for a time I looked, but inevitably I would get rid of them because they knew or saw too much. They would see the truth – that I was horrible and unlovable – and would write me a letter saying they didn’t want to be around me any longer, just like you did.

 

That rejection was compounded by the abuse I suffered at the hands of my grandfather, then by the jealousy of my step-father, then the manipulation of those in authority over me and of course the constant bullying I suffered throughout school. I was constantly offended and defensive. I would misconstrue the smallest things, filtering my entire existence through the wound of your abandonment. People would make jokes at my expense or comment on something I said, and I would hear something completely different.  I had difficulty reading people and understanding their motivations and because of this I found myself isolated and alone. It was easier to exist in my own space so that I could be protected and safe. The world was against me and in the end, rejection became my ally, my friend and my confidant and it would take years of work and effort to say goodbye to it so that it no longer had power in my life.

 

I have determined that not even an apology would suffice. If you rocked up at my doorstep, I wouldn’t open the door. An apology wouldn’t take away the pain and remove the burden from my shoulders. It wouldn’t magically erase all the toxicity from my life. It wouldn’t magically heal the wound you left me with – no, that would be the fantasy.

 

You’ve had forty years to reach out and try. You’ve had your chance and I reserve the right to take any future chances away from you.

And I will never forget…

 

You were never there.

 

(Dale died on 10/12/2022 while I was writing this book. He never got to see this. He died suddenly. As much as I have fantasised that he might one day reach out, or on his death bed he would ask to see me to let go of the burden I imagine he’s carried, there was no chance for that to happen. Instead, in his last days, as with the last 40 years of my life, he was never there).