Dear Internet,
Today, everyone is posting about their grand adventures with their fathers, or reminiscing of the ones they had long past. For me, it’s a day of deep sorrow.
For reasons only my mother knows, she scythed a field of young potential connections between my father and I beginning with my birth, and then salted the earth that owned those stalks so that by the time my father passed away in 2001, he and I were barely on speaking terms and I knew nothing about him. It would not be until later, oh so much later, to find out much of what my mother told me was not actual truths but a series of lies she built around her own notion of truth to protect something she has yet to reveal.
When I was very young, my mother started laying down the path of the potentially of my father having molested me. The actual conversation of what trying to figure out what my mother ment, that stemmed from her lines, began in my teenager years which consisted of me asking and confronting her. These conversations, at least, are still pretty clear in my head even if the outcome at the time, from her lips, was muddled.
There are two things you, dear reader, must know. The first is my parents separated when I was five months old, so the total amount of time, as a child, I lived with my father was less than a year. Due to the custodial agreements, with me now living in the US and him in Canada, I rarely saw him for visits. The second thing you must know is my father is neither an angel nor is he the devil. He could read at an eighth grade level and was working on his high school diploma when he died. He was a recovering alcoholic. He had a very generous and had a big heart. He wanted me to have the world.
According to my mother, during the many trips I took with my father as a child when I would go to visit during vacations, there was whispers being made because of his age in relation to mine – 45 years – and what he could possibly be doing with such a young child? The whispers apparently came from hotel clerks when we would go traveling to amusement parks and such all over southern Ontario and from his landladies from where he was renting his apartments, and other places. Apparently, at one point, police were called numerous times on suspicion of kidnapping and abuse.
When I prod my mother now about these things to clarify and to know, she says she cannot remember. It was a long time ago. Why does it matter? Why can’t I let it go? (Because I cannot remember these instances you speak of mother!)
Then one day I came to the realization that:
- If my father had molested me, my mother continually sent me back to him time and time again; she didn’t protect me
- If my father had not molested me, she continued to pour the gasoline on this line of thinking for years and she literally destroyed any chance of me having a relationship with him, even after I had become an adult and had begun my own life
It was upon this day of realization, I stopped having any and all contact with my mother for I could not conceiving of a world where a person would willingly send their child off to be hurt OR would lie about unspeakable horrors to appease their own agenda. (We’re not the Lannisters!)
In my heart, I feel like if something did happen, but it was not with my father, but with someone else close to the family. Who? I don’t know. Infamously, I have no memory of my life before the age of 12, sometimes it feels like I sprung up fully formed like Athena.
From what I know now, and from what he was like during my teenage and later years, I never or ever felt like he was a threat to me sexually or otherwise. I never felt like something was “wrong,” only that my mother kept insisting something was wrong.
And I’m still coming to grips that I’ll never know the truth of the whys and hows of my mother’s reasoning to lie. I also am still working on accepting I will never have a relationship with my father and no matter how much I yell I AM SO FUCKING SORRY! to the void of the world, or cuddle his urn while murmuring like an insane person, this will never feel right. It will never be right. No matter how many tears of that are stripped from me, I will never ever have that chance to make it up to him.
This would be the point where I tell those of you with living fathers of all kinds, to love, cherish, and respect them. But I’m too sad and too angry to be graceful. This is not a day of celebration, this is my day of mourning. I cannot be gracious when my heart feels so utterly broken.
x0x0,
Lisa
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