For Me, The Term "Daddy" Had Everything To Do With My Father.

(this is not about incest). 

I could use many adjectives to describe my father but I have a story that does it better. Five years ago, it was his sixtieth birthday and on occasion of his sixtieth birthday he was working in Germany. It could be worse, he could have been in the middle of the ocean, at least this way there's a steakhouse around. So since we couldn't throw him a party and I can't show up at home with a bottle of scotch, I sent him some flowers (which he received and I know that **only** because someone whose accent I could not decipher called me to tell me they delivered them) and I called him in the morning to wish him happy birthday. He didn't acknowledge my wishes but he did ask me why I wasn't making more money yet. About ninety seconds into our conversation, which was awkward and vague, he asked me why I was wasting so much time on the phone instead of working. And then he hung up because he had to leave for the office.

My relationship with my father has always been awkward and uncomfortable. We don't talk to each other very much and we don't see each other very often. We both have a knack for always working the holidays so it actually is quite easy to avoid each other. But I don't think the avoidance is about not wanting to know about each other but more about not wanting to discover how much it is that we don't know about each other. Honestly, I don't know my father at all. I see him quite rarely and when I do he only asks about jobs and careers and why I don't make more money. This is all we have talked about since I was a child. This, and politics.

Obviously our relationship didn't get to this point overnight. It started very small, when I was a child, when he realized that he was letting me face the brunt of my mother's mental illness by always staying away. That is where the guilt started for him. For me, the guilt started when I was old enough to realize I was assisting my mother to betray him. Yet I couldn't really bring myself to support my father because I can remember, quite clearly, his abuse towards my mother. The nail in the coffin of our relationship came when my father found out when I was 22 that I had been raped. My mother told him. He apologized to me. He said he was sorry he couldn't protect me and that remains to this day the only time my father has displayed an emotion. After that, he really stopped even trying with me. Some part of me feels like he accepted that I will never have normal relationships with the people in our family and he decided that he didn't have it in him to try for an unconventional relationship. Now he doesn't participate in my life at all. Usually if he has something to say to me, he says it through my mother.

I worry about him.

I worry about him because he doesn't talk to anyone and he doesn't seem to enjoy anything. I worry about him because sometimes I see his life story and I wonder if I could ever find a way to be happy after all of that. I worry that he'll never tell me that he's proud of me or I did anything right. I worry that the guilt of having betrayed him in so many ways will never leave me and I'll never be able to just hold his hand and not feel my skin crawl. I worry that he's depressed but he'll never say anything about it no matter how many times I try to ask. I worry that he's completely oblivious to any concern anyone may have for him because he doesn't believe himself worth it. I worry that I'll never know how he feels or what makes him happy.

But at the same time I know that this relationship is beyond repair. It has always been. See I love my father. But what I love about him is an idea. In my mind I have this idea that deep inside him somewhere there's a man who loves him daughters and wants to be there for them. A man who wants to spend his sixtieth birthday with his family. A man who'll see a bottle of scotch I brought him and tell me why it's nice instead of telling me why I should have bought something else. A man who will read something I wrote and point out something other than the one typo. A man who will stay an extra day so he can see me instead of telling me to just have lunch with him at the airport.

But that, is just an idea. In reality I accept that no member of our family brings him any kind of joy and I actually wish that he has another family in another country that makes him happy in some way. Because for the most part my father did things right, he provided and didn't disappear completely when things got too hard, the only thing wrong with him is that he's in the wrong family.

And I am part of the wrong family.

I will never get from my father any kind of love or approval. I accepted that way too many years ago but the part of me that still yearns for a loving father figure has been unfulfilled for years. See the thing is that I used to make fun of approval needs and daddy issues, especially my own, because I figured at some point you realize that life is about approving of yourself and living for yourself. Holding onto some unmet childhood needs didn't seem healthy. In fact, it seemed a little bit like an excuse for some of my behaviors so I did not indulge it.

Until I did.

Until someone (remarkably similar to my father) held me in their arms and said I was their daughter. Until someone I view as a father (figure) told me I had value and told me that I hadn't wasted my life or done nothing to be proud of. Until someone I call daddy gave me the approval I didn't even know I was still craving. Until daddy saw me exactly as the person I am and didn't hate me for it, or worse, cut me out of his life except for in name. Until I could open up this part of me that feels wronged by my own father to someone I see as a father and let him see all that was missing inside me. Until I let myself be a child again and heard someone tell me that everything that went wrong wasn't my fault and he was still proud of me for surviving it all. It took a father like relationship to repair some of the damage my relationship with my own father has caused. It took a father like relationship for me to be able to acknowledge that I had ever been a child who wasn't responsible for everything in the world. It took a father like relationship to fill some kind of hole I didn't know I had developed. It also helps that this father of mine tells me things about himself. He tells me what he feels and what he things. He makes me a part of his life and is a part of mine. He'd not an object of mystery whose depression I worry about but can never do anything about. It helps me that I feel like I can reach out to him. It helps that I can see him clearly as who he is.

Because my daddy helps me fulfill the needs I can never have met by my father. So I call my boyfriend daddy because I have unresolved issues with my father. I'm a stereotype. It's okay. Because, why wouldn't it be?