Fatherless Daughters
The sunlight was beautiful, breaking through the clouds that littered the sky outside my porthole, lighting up the shimmering water like a sparkle of diamonds. In the distance, I could see the deep green of the Sitka National Forest park, cloaked in mystery as the morning fog wrapped the coastline. As I walked into the cabin, my boyfriend was relaxing on the bed watching a program about Orca whales. I stood in the doorway, listening to the host talk about the matriarchal society that Orca’s lived in. Bags of Subway sandwiches were clenched in both hands, lunch for the two of us, giving us a break from the typical cruise ship food. We were anchored in Sitka, Alaska for the day and as soon as we were done our tender service, I had gone ashore that morning for a Reiki treatment. I’d been feeling “off” for a while but couldn’t put my finger on why I was experiencing the emotional rollercoaster I was on, so I thought a little energy balancing would help. I remember telling the Reiki practitioner the reason for my visit and later hearing the surprise in my voice when in turn, she told me that I was the most balanced person she’d worked on in a long time! By the end of my session, while I felt better in my body, my mind was still actively trying to find the source of my angst.
However as I stood there, gazing at that room, completely grounded in my body and being, there it was … like a lightning bolt from the sky. I was delivered the answer to my “why”. That man, lying on the bed waiting for his lunch, was a walking, talking representation of the battle I’d had all of my life. In that instant, I knew the source of my angst, the root cause. I was busy trying to muscle through a dysfunctional relationship with a man who represented the relationship I never had with my Father. While was physically available, he (like my Father) was not emotionally available. I recognized myself in all of it … everything I had done up until this pivotal moment, was an attempt to gain emotional validation from a man who would never have the capacity to love me, much less give me that pat on the back or a hug of “well done, girl”.
My parents were divorced when I was a young child. I think I was 4 or 5 when my Mom drummed up the courage to finally leave my Father. We had to pack up and leave while he was at work in order to avoid his wrath. That is how afraid my Mom was. Leaving was the only way she could survive, escaping an abusive relationship and to this day, I understand. Luckily I was never one of those kids that blamed myself for the divorce, I knew it was my Father’s angry temper. One of the memories of those days living with my Father is of an argument where he threw her from the kitchen into the living room where I was playing on the floor. It’s funny how the mind plays tricks on us but I could swear it was the night that the Wizard of Oz was on tv. How ironic that the symbolism of Dorothy being tossed into Oz by an angry storm aligns with my Mom flying through the air, tossed by my angry Father, to land in the living room. Reality or dream? Who can remember but it doesn’t matter, it was the years afterwards that have taken their toll.
Over the years, I’ve had many friends who with profound respect for my feelings, who have never asked me about my Father. Since I have an incredible relationship with my Mom, she’s always been woven into my experiences and stories. Needless to say, I’ve had a tendency to talk a lot about her with little to no mention of my Father in the tapestry of my life. In the random times that I’ve asked my friends, they tell me that they never asked about him because they thought he had died and didn’t want to open old wounds. I’ve loved my friends for that, but at the same time, there is a form of catharsis that goes with openly talking about painful memories, as long as you use it as a time to heal. You can poke the wounds and sit and play with the pain or use the pain to make you stronger. It is a conscious choice available to everyone.
My first conscious choice I exercised came with my high school graduation. I sat on the floor with my head in my Mom’s lap, sobbing. Here I was, getting ready to graduate from high school and heading off to college in the fall. A student with excellent grades, my best friend a Valedictorian, I’d spent the past year going to high school in the morning and then taking afternoon Art classes at Westminster, the college in town. I had everything going for me. I was popular. I was smart. I was adaptable. I was multi-talented. I’d even won a scholarship to college through the company that my Father worked for. He had to have been aware of it … my name was published in the company announcements and newspaper. His friends would have patted him on the shoulder and said, “great job Charlie”. But with the celebration, not one card, not one phone call to say “congratulations” from my Father. I was devastated. I had become an overachiever but with all of this going for me, still I could not get my Father to love me. Incredibly painful for a blooming 16-year old with a bright future!
The questions tumbled from my mouth, and my poor Mom … what could she say? Since the divorce, she remained neutral whenever my Father’s name was mentioned. Mom should have been an ambassador to a foreign country, that is how neutral she was! Mom was adamant that I not grow up influenced by her opinion of him and she never tried to recruit me over to her perspective of my Father. Just because she divorced him, didn’t mean that I would be forced to lose the opportunity to have a relationship with his family. I continued with monthly visits to my Grandparents, who I loved dearly but acted as if nothing was off kilter. On top of that, Mom had exhausted herself working to support the two of us financially, and support me intellectually and emotionally. She’d done an excellent job taking on both the role of the Mother AND the Father and yet in that moment, there was absolutely nothing she could say that could make me feel better. There are only so many excuses one can make.
However, the emotional tidal wave that I rode that day, delivered me to a place of acceptance and I began to look at myself from a different perspective. I began to understand that my Father’s emotional distance was not my fault, it was his loss. There was nothing I could ever do, say, achieve that could change his mind or get him to open his heart to me … the one thing I longed for. I, the innocent child in all of it, blamed myself for his lack of presence in my life. Up until that moment on the dining room floor, I had assumed that I had to do more, achieve more, be more … for someone else. My Father’s lack, my Father’s choice, was a result of his shortcomings, not mine. I recognized that while he was my Father, he was not my Dad. I believe this was the beginning of my love for language interpretation and the importance of being clear when you say what you mean. My Father gave me life, but at the same time, his lack of presence was taking my Life, holding me hostage to a sense of “smallness” that I resented. It was my first understanding, but not my last experience with being a Fatherless Daughter. And it was my first step towards healing.
So on this particular day, as a myriad of memories washed over me, set free from the energy work that the Reiki practitioner did on me that morning, a shift as deep as an earthquake erupted. I was finally able to look at myself, my relationship and my angst objectively! With my boyfriend in front of me and a million memories behind me, I knew it was time to make another conscious choice, taking another step forward in my journey of healing. I was living in the shadow world of the typical Fatherless Daughter and I had to ask myself, “why did I want to continue carrying the burden of the original wound around with me?” I was doing what every other Fatherless Daughter would do. I was trying to heal that original wound through a relationship with a man who was a recreation of my Father. That is living Einstein’s definition of insanity!
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over, expecting different results.
The term Fatherless Daughter might be new for some of you, however for millions of us, it is as familiar as looking at oneself in the mirror. We are children of men who are not present in our lives. An absentee father is not just about the death of a parent, it can be a result of divorce or a father who was physically present but emotionally unavailable. He could be in jail, have addictions, or just simply a man who couldn’t take the pressure of parenthood and disappeared. There can be a plethora of reasons why a Father walks away, however the emotional impact that it leaves in a child can leave you with feelings of frustration, anger, and depression. Deep seated feelings of not being good enough. Fears of abandonment permeate every future relationship or leave you with difficulty navigating intimate relationships, trying to fill the void that has been left behind. We just don’t learn how to do it, build and maintain a healthy relationship with a man. No one was there to teach us, it’s not that we are bad at it … we lack the experience. A Fatherless Daughter can end up with eating disorders both bulimia, anorexia or obesity, hiding your emotions in food, replacing your missing Father with each bite. The repercussions run deep, can be as unique as the situation and the people in the story. But it’s just that, the story we keep telling ourselves that is real.
I once read …
“to recover from a father's abandonment, a woman "must learn how to father herself, hold herself, and receive the type of love a father provides. It is a lifelong process, but with the proper support, tools, and patience, it is totally possible. That being said, the grief and pain never goes away, it just changes." - Caitlin Marvaso, AMFT, a grief counselor & therapist
Since that fateful day in my cabin, I began a journey of self-discovery that has taken me on a healing process that began with inner-child work, while I re-fathered myself by cultivating a loving relationship with that wounded and abandoned child within. I’ve often wondered if that was one of the reasons why I never wanted to get married? But later, once I realized …
I was the one I’d been waiting for all along.
I experienced one of the deepest transformations of my life. My heart healed itself from the inside out and I no longer searched for healing from the outside in. I was finally able to open my heart and not fear abandonment.
While I can’t say that the sense of loss from my Father’s original abandonment has fully dissolved, I’m ok. We are all here to experience loss of some sort and just like Kubler-Ross writes in On Death and Dying, there are five stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. While my Father didn’t die, the relationship has and it deserves to be mourned, so on many occasions I’ve consciously applied those stages to my healing process, remaining present to the feelings that are moving through me at the time. I have learned to accept my Father for who he is and the choices he made decades ago. I can’t change them and I can’t change him. All I can do is change ME and give the best version of me to the world that I can be. I have practiced forgiveness … and I’m not saying it was easy, because it wasn’t. It was work and there are still conversations that have the ability to bump up against that Karmic Button.
Today, I am happily married to a wonderfully loving man who arrived in my life with a BANG and who came with two beautiful little boys who are now teenagers. At our wedding, my Mom and Uncle gave me away and the boys were our attendants. Now there is one big thing that I am grateful for in being a Fatherless Daughter … I believe that the experience has provided me with the gift of valuable tools to help my husband navigate his delicate relationship with the boys who in turn deal with the emotional rollercoaster of divorce. Together we strive to be better parents … him a Dad, me a cheerleader and Step-Mom, and the boys who know they are LOVED wholly and completely.
Together and as individuals, we know we are enough.