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I often say I could write a whole book about my father. I have spent countless hours pondering what it would be like to delve into the confines of his fragile mind. Whether he would admit it or not, his mind is fragile. It has to be. How else am I to rationalise the crimes he normalised in my home? My mother’s home. I am grateful for the privilege of being my mother’s daughter, and I suppose I am grateful for all my father has taught me. He taught me to be kind through his cruelty, to be gentle through his violence, to be strong through his weakness.
I suppose I ought to start by admitting that I truly know little about him and you will have to forgive my lack of trust in his childhood stories. I know that he was born in Yorkshire. That he got into fights a lot. That he was disruptive at school. He struggles with spelling and grammar, he has needed glasses since he was a teenager, he grew up chubby but it fell off him during puberty and now he somehow believes that a woman’s weight should behave exactly the same as his.
I also know that he is cruel. He lies, yet hates when people lie to him. I know he is a hypocrite, I know he is abusive, I know that he has been abused. I know he lacks empathy, I know he feels hard done by, I know he is a serial cheat. I know he resents his daughters. I know there is something broken inside him that he is unwilling to fix. I struggle to think about him. It hurts me to know that because no attempt was made to save him, from him I, myself, had to be saved.
There is something uniquely earth-shattering about learning that blood has no obligation to place love on the table and offer it freely. To be taught that love must be earned, even by someone who had a hand in your creation, is something else entirely. It forces you to question the very nature of it. It begs you to wonder whether or not you are worthy enough to receive the broken pieces of a person’s soul and glue them back together again. I know that I am worthy. He does not.
I wish, often, that he knew my sister and I could have held his heart in our hands and cherished it with a gentility only we were designed to manage. That he didn’t need the job, or the house, or the women. He needed the only people in the world destined to understand him. Two little girls who may never stop screaming at the sky, expecting some kind of answer as to why he broke them. Maybe if he had bonded with us, if he had taken the time to learn who his children were, he wouldn’t be so alone. The worst part is, I do understand him. To an extent. Of course, it is natural that I cannot grasp specific aspects of his nature, as they are not engrained into mine. But I see him. What he has hidden behind the eyes we share, I am privy to. An untold, undeniable truth that is unbearable to hold the weight of.
He once felt too much. Now, he feels nothing at all. He faces a dull, vast, empty pit. A pit that blatantly cannot ever be filled. A massive, gaping, chasm of absolute nothingness. I learned a long time ago, not to step foot in it.
I feel sorry for my father. I pity the man who had to reach through the depths of his own personal Hell for a fleeting, temporary taste of a life that barely resembles Heaven.