With My Father

“One day you were just this tiny little thing with crossed eyes, and then the next thing I know we’re sittin’ here … and I can’t remember anything in between.” Sadly, it’s not a scene from a National Lampoon’s Vacation movie. These were the last words my father spoke to me before he dropped me off at university. I was almost nineteen years old, and my father was a stranger. That was a time when psychologists hadn’t learned to stress the role of a father, and I don’t think any of us knew the price we would pay for a father’s absence. Over the years I’ve wondered how this affected my twisted little view on relationships and I keep coming back to this question: what happens when a woman’s first relationship with a man is simply nonexistent?

The answer to that is probably more complicated than all the people who have been in this position, and truthfully, I only know my answer. Let’s set the stage. I was born with a rather nasty birth defect, and there was a point early on where a particularly long surgery left me at death’s door. My three-year-old body had lost its entire blood content four times over and I convulsed with a near 107° fever. The doctors advised my parents to say their goodbyes and prepare themselves—my dad did. I really think he lost me that day, that he said goodbye and let go. When the miracle came, it was too late for my father, something inside of him had died, and he let me go with it. After that, no matter how hard I tried to be close, to be his little girl, he pushed me away.

In all honesty, I wasn’t exactly the sort of daughter that inspired pride and joy in a father. I was fat, ugly, mouthy, tomboyish, and always, always right. My father kept an embarrassed distance from me. I thought it was because I was such a failure as a girl; now I think it had more to do with his fear of the unknown … and by that I mean me.

I didn’t attract any amorous attention from boys—the most feared event in any father’s life—but cruelties and teasing stuck to me like flies on shit. To be fair, I provoked some of it. There was one incident in particular that was unprovoked, and to this day, it’s quite mysterious to me. A boy in my class (we’ll call him Daniel) had developed a rather blatant hatred of me. He tormented me in some of the usual ways: teasing, posters on my locker, and other pranks. Then there were the less usual methods: urinating in the back of my car and threatening me with a rifle.

Daniel’s turn towards the homicidal got around town.