Waiting for My Father

Growing up without a father and becoming responsible for myself

My father is a sheer sillhouette imprinted on my soul, a vibe more than a person, a projection created from the scraps of his presence.

Imagine an old-school projector; a box of slides. Here is the father of my infancy, wearing his Sea Org uniform, standing in an apartment somewhere in Southern California. He’s in his thirties, married to my twenty year-old mother, his third or fourth wife (one of the many things I’ll never know for sure).

The slides are (in no particular order)

the concrete stairs and entryways on and in which I waited for him after promises of shopping trips and shared meals.

the Cadillacs he drove, always different, smelling of leather and cigarettes, their metal parts hot as flames against my fingers, the backs of my legs sticky with sweat, his music (Chicago, Genesis, Three Dog Night, Fleetwood Mac), the anticipation of our unknown destination (a bar, a new girlfriend’s house, the swap meet).

my mother’s voice on the days he didn’t show, the dusky summer darkness settling in, my ears attuned to the sound of traffic, waiting for his car to turn into our parking lot. Did you tell him we moved? Has he called? The sound of the phone a fist cleching and unclenching my heart.

he was the first boy I waited for, the first one who stood me up, who I stayed with and hoped would change, who I surrounded with shrines of sadness and longing, setting them aflame with prayers, offering myself up in exchange for a shared moment, a smile, a glance.

my mother, rarely tender, always softened on those evenings, calling me in after hours of waiting. It’s okay to cry but I never did, not even after I closed my bedroom door to stare out the darkening window, still holding out hope, imagining he got his days mixed up, he’d come tomorrow, he’d call and reschedule, he’d send a present in the mail, he was a knight astride a horse, the one who could and would eventually save me if only I could prove myself worthy of saving.

my heartbreak flooded everything: Limbs, organs, sinew and psyche, every man became my father, I imagined them saving me from near death, from danger– not because I was a damsel but because I was a child with no arms protecting me, enclosed in physical shelter while exposed to the spiritual elements, a whiteout, a forever blinding snowstorm, me squinting into the distance, hoping to see refuge.

my father was a man who didn’t understand children’s worship. I imagine myself promising something to a child, failing to come through, disappearing for years before resurfacing, hunting down the new phone number, the rings, the click of connection and the child’s voice, now a little more mature, a little older, those years lost to time and yet there’s the hope, the love streaming through wires for miles and miles. More promises. My eagerness must have been like drugs for his ego, yes? I couldn’t imagine him then, not as a person. To me he was a God, incapable of wrongs.

I can count our outings on less than ten fingers, always to a girlfriend’s place or to meet a girlfriend or fiancé. The girlfriends loved me and I leaned into their warmth, desperate. When they left, he did, too.

I never correlated my need for men’s approval to my father’s absence. “Need for men’s approval” is an understatement. I was desperate for men. I wanted to be consumed by them and consume them. I wanted to crush them and I let them crush me. Once a man asked me why I let him treat me so badly and my only response was I don’t care. I was twenty-one and cared deeply. What I meant was I don’t know. The key to my love was abandonement. Return, and I abandoned.

The last time I saw my father was in 2010.

I was twenty-nine and he was an old man with white hair whose profile popped up on facebook. Sixteen years before, when I was thirteen, he had called me to make plans for the weekend, a shopping spree at the mall, another no show. This time he’d stood me up again, twice, but I still showed up at the pizza place in Alki and sat across from him, a man I barely recognized and, to my surprise, felt almost no connection with. At the time, my mother was four months away from her suicide, drowning in wine and self-hatred, and I had come to Seattle trying to save her.

He kept saying he couldn’t believe I’d turned out so well. How pretty I was. How grown-up.

We didn’t know each other at all. He was a stranger to me, but seemed to think we were related in some way, that he had ownership over my success in some way.

I wasn’t angry, or sad, though I felt him as sadness, as the emptiness I’d been trying to escape or fill up for as long as I could remember. I felt his absence as he spoke to me, as I watched him sitting across from me.

Three years later, after my mom’s death, after I had gotten myself into college and started a whole different life, my father emailed me. He had Leukemia, and was living in Southern California again. I spent the summer of 2013 working at Esalen Institute. We exchanged another round of emails. He was bitter, accusatory. What was I doing with my life? Was it in service to a greater good? Did I know how successful he’d been as a salesperson, how much he’d been knocked down in his life? It was unnacceptable to him that I was in California but hadn’t arranged a visit. I had thought of going but decided against it. He might kidnap me. He might harm me. My childlike trust was gone. I didn’t tell him this. It didn’t matter. In his email, he “declined to reunite as father/daughter.” For so long I’d imagined a relationship with him. Dreamed of one.

I let go.

Several months later, he died. I was in the middle of my second fall semester at Syracuse when the hospice coordinator called to tell me I should come to California. Frantically I searched for tickets, began making arrangements, but several hours later she called back and said he was gone. A friend of his called me– could he have my father’s car? I said yes. The man had cared for my dad, apparently. I saw the GoFundMe online. You can keep whatever you’d like, you knew him better than I did. Eventually I received a box in the mail: several watches, his birth and death certificate, military discharge papers, a device used for Scientology, some photos, mostly of people I didn’t know. A letter from the man, telling me my father had loved me.

A photo of me taken around 2014

I was in my early thirties, an orphan who had already lived most of my life without parents who were present, alive or not.

Now I’m approaching my 45th birthday. Since my mother’s death in 2010, I haven’t had a romantic relationship lasting more than one month. Each time I’ve tried I’ve been overcome by the desolation in which I lived for so long; for almost forever. Will I ever be able to let someone love me, and see me, and love them back? I’m not sure. But I do know this: I don’t have a child, and I am not responsible for anyone but myself. There are reasons I’ve chosen to remain single and without children. We all have our reasons, whether we know them or admit them to ourselves or others. I hope I can foster– that’s my next big goal. Because despite my younger self believing I was like my parents, I’ve cared for other people’s children for decades, and loved doing it.

I also know that I have love. More love than I ever could have imagined for myself in one lifetime. My work, when it comes to love, is not in offering, which comes easily, but in accepting. Removing the boulders I placed in the channel and opening the conduit of energy exchange. My father was once responsible for me. My mother, too. And for a long time I held them responsible for who I was and blamed them for what I hated in myself. This, in turn, made hating myself easier.

Part of growing up is simply to be an agent in one’s own life, to have agency and see oneself as responsible for one’s actions.

Some adults are still children, and they will die as children, their childhood wounds unhealed. That’s not a value statement, just an opinion.

Lately I’ve been reminding myself that I’m 44 years-old.

I’ll say it out loud: I’m a 44 year-old adult.

What a gift, to be an agent in one’s own life.

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