He disowned me twice. They were over small things, slight disagreements that led him to denounce me as his child. When he decided that everything was fine again, I was expected to accept his change of heart—no apologies (unless they were mine), no further mention of the incident. Each time, I let my mother convince me to give him another chance.
But three months ago he went too far. He betrayed my mother, and in trying to support her, I was subjected to an angry diatribe. I was a fucking bitch for finding out about his infidelity. I had no right to invade his privacy.
This time, I disowned him. I moved out (at twenty, I’d been staying at home for the summer). I’ve ceased all contact. And though my mother is more understanding of my position than she once was, she’s still trying to fix that broken relationship. While I know I could live happily without my father, and that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been since he’s been gone from my life, it’s like I can never fully escape him. My mother constantly talks about him, how he’s changed. She wants to know when I’ll be ready to be around him again. It’s hard to explain that I really don’t feel anything anymore.
In spite of my mother’s claims, my father is still trying to control me, still so consumed by his image that he disregards my feelings. He found out that my therapist—an understanding, kind, and sympathetic counselor—was a woman he worked with and insisted I stop seeing her. Yet another attempt to keep me isolated, away from any outside support. Still, my mother is pressuring me (sometimes unconsciously) to make it work. But I no longer trust him, no longer trust my judgment when it comes to my father.
We will never have a good relationship, but is it right for me to sever it completely, Sugar? So many people insist that family is too important, that it is my duty to forgive the man that gave me life. He’s the only father that I have. But is it worth the pain, the self-doubt, and the depression?
Could Be Worse
Dear Could Be Worse,
No, maintaining a relationship with your abusive father is not worth the pain, the self-doubt, and the depression. In cutting off ties with him, you have done the right thing. It’s true that he is the only father you will ever have, but that does not give him the right to abuse you. The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.
Your father does not currently meet that standard.
I’m sorry your dad is an abusive narcissist. I’m sorry your mother has opted to placate his madness at your expense. Those are two very hard things. Harder still would be a life spent allowing yourself to be abused. I know that liberating yourself from your father’s tyranny isn’t easy or uncomplicated, but it’s the right way. And it’s also the only way that might—just might—someday lead to a healthy relationship between the two of you. By insisting that your father treat you with respect, you are fulfilling your greatest duty, not only as a daughter, but as a human. That you stopped interacting with an abuser as powerful as your father is a testament to your courage and strength. You have my respect.
I haven’t had parents as an adult. I’ve lived so long without them and yet I carry them with me every day. They are like two empty bowls I’ve had to repeatedly fill on my own.
I suppose your father will have the same effect on you. In some ways, you’re right: you probably won’t ever “fully escape” your dad. He will be the empty bowl that you’ll have to fill again and again. What will you put inside? Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. There is absolutely no way around them. By cutting off ties with your father, you incited a revolution in your life. How now are you going to live?
I said you were strong and brave to stop communicating with your father because you did something many people can never do. You set a boundary. You decided that you will not be mistreated and you acted upon that decision. That choice was born of anger and hurt. The territory beyond it is born of healing and transformation and peace—at least it is if you’d like to have a smashingly beautiful life.
What I mean to say is that you’ve left your father, but your relationship with him isn’t over. It will take you years to fully come to terms with him (and also with your mother, by the way). There is so much work to do that has to do with forgiveness and anger, with acceptance and letting go, with sorrow and even perhaps a complicated joy. Those things do not move in a direct trajectory. They weave in and out of each other and wind back to smack you in the ass. They will punch you in the face and make you cry and laugh. You say you will never have a good relationship with your dad, but you don’t know. You will change. Maybe he will too. Some facts of your childhood will remain immutable, but others won’t. You may never make sense of your father’s cruelty, but with work and with mindfulness, with understanding and heart, you will make sense of him.
I hope you have the guts to do it.
After my mother died when I was twenty-two, I wrote a letter to my dad. I hated him by then, but there was a bright crack in my hate that had been made entirely by my mother’s love, into which my father could have slipped if he’d changed. In the letter, I told him my mother had suddenly died and also that I had always hoped that someday we could have a relationship. I said that in order for me to do that, he first had to explain to me why he’d done the things he’d done when we’d been together.
Sometimes I imagine my father opening that letter. It was twenty years ago and though just about everything in my life has changed in those twenty years, my imagining of my father receiving the letter with news of my mother’s death has not. In my mind, he cries softly at the news. He realizes his three children are now orphans and here’s his chance to make things right. Here’s his chance to be our dad. It’s not too late. We need him now.
But he didn’t realize that. Instead, he got drunk and called to say that I was a lying bitch and that our mother had tainted our minds and turned my siblings and me against him. I hung up without saying goodbye.
Seventeen years passed.
Then one day the phone rang and there it was: my father’s name on the tiny screen of my telephone. He’s dead, was my first thought. I believed his third wife was calling to tell me that. I didn’t pick up the phone. I only watched it ring. I listened to the message a few minutes later.
It wasn’t my father’s third wife. It was my father. “This is your father,” he said, followed by his first and last name, in case I didn’t know who my father was. He told me his phone number and asked me to call him.
It took me a week to do it. I was done with him. I had filled up the empty bowl of him over and over again. I had walked barefoot across a bunch of crap carrying it in my hands. I hadn’t let anything slosh out. I didn’t love him anymore. I only remembered that I had loved him. So long ago.
I dialed his number. “Hello,” he said—his voice so familiar after all this time.
“This is your daughter,” I said, followed by my first and last name, in case he didn’t know who his daughter was.
“Do you watch Rachael Ray?” he asked.
“Rachael Ray?” I whispered, barely able to speak, my heart racing.
“Rachael Ray, you know. The cookbook writer. She has a talk show.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
And on it went, the most flabbergasting conversation I’ve ever had. My father spoke to me as if we spoke every week, as if nothing that had happened had happened, as if my whole childhood did not exist. We chatted about low-fat recipes and poodles; cataracts and the importance of sunscreen. I got off the phone fifteen minutes later, utterly bewildered. He wasn’t delusional or ill or giving in to age-induced dementia. He was my father. The man he’d always been. And he was talking to me as if I was his daughter. As if he had a right.
But he didn’t. Shortly afterwards he sent me a chatty note over email. When I replied, I said what I’
d said in the letter I’d written to him years before—that I would consider having a relationship with him only after we spoke honestly about our shared past. He replied inquiring what it was I “wanted to know.”
I had come so far by then. I had accepted the facts of my life. I was happy. I had two children and a partner I loved. I wasn’t angry with my father anymore. I didn’t want to hurt him. But I couldn’t pretend to have a relationship with him if he refused to acknowledge our life. I was prepared to listen. I wanted his insight, to know what he thought, and also to see if by some wondrous turn of events, he’d become a different man—one who could at last be my dad.
I wrote the most generous, loving, true, fearless, painful, mature, and forgiving letter I could muster. Then I pasted it into an email and pressed Send.
My father’s reply came so quickly it seemed impossible that he’d read the whole thing. In enraged words he wrote that I should never contact him again and that he was glad to be finally rid of me.
I didn’t cry. I laced on my running shoes and went out my front door and walked through my neighborhood to a park and up a big hill. I didn’t stop walking until I got all the way to the top and then I sat down on a bench that looked over the city. It was the week before my thirty-ninth birthday. I always think of my parents on my birthday, don’t you? And I imagine it in the same way I imagine my father getting the letter I wrote to him after my mother died—it doesn’t change, no matter what happened afterwards. I can conjure my mother and my father so clearly on the day I was born. How truly they must have loved me. How they must have held me in their arms and thought that I was a miracle. They must have believed they could be better people than they’d been before. They would be. They knew they would. They had to be. Because now there was me.
So it felt particularly acute to sit on that bench absorbing what had just transpired. I had that feeling you get—there is no word for this feeling—when you are simultaneously happy and sad and angry and grateful and accepting and appalled and every other possible emotion, all smashed together and amplified. Why is there no word for this feeling?
Perhaps because the word is “healing” and we don’t want to believe that. We want to believe healing is purer and more perfect, like a baby on its birthday. Like we’re holding it in our hands. Like we’ll be better people than we’ve been before. Like we have to be.
It is on that feeling that I have survived. And it will be your salvation too, my dear. When you reach the place that you recognize entirely that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them. That you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them. That you have the two empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them.
That’s what I did the week before I turned thirty-nine. I filled the empty bowl of my father one last time. I sat for so long on that bench looking at the sky and the land and the trees and the buildings and the streets, thinking: My father—my father!—he is finally, finally, finally rid of me.
Yours,
Sugar
TRANSCEND
Dear Sugar,
I’m torn. I feel like I have to decide between the two things I love the most. My wife and I have an eighteen-month-old daughter. Our marriage has been rocky for years. My wife is a heroin addict who relapsed (post-baby), after seven years of recovery. She had been breastfeeding and snorting opioids until the night I caught her.
I come from three generations of addiction from both my parents. I got sober myself when I was a teen and turned my life around while living at a boys’ home, which I consider partially my home. I now work as a drug counselor at this very place. I have become a walking example for the Los Angeles street kids I work with, who are much like me. This work is my calling. It has even inspired me to write my novel, which has become the most stolen book at the boys’ home where I work.
Here is where the tear in my soul begins. My wife is from a small city in the South. I met her there. My mother died when I was living there. My wife was there for me. That city healed me. Recently my wife got an opportunity for a job that’s based in that city. All of my wife’s family and support are there. She just had her second interview and is probably going to be offered this great job.
I’m confused about what to do. Things are progressing for me professionally. I’m halfway through my master’s degree in social work and momentum is building in my life. Right before my wife got this job opportunity, she had confessed to being on methadone (prescribed by her doctor) for the last three months to wean her off her heavy addiction. She chose not to tell me even though I have been supportive and had been asking for connection since her relapse. It might not make sense, but I felt more betrayed by this than I do by her relapse. I just want her to have a connection with me.
If she gets the job, I don’t know if I can make the commitment to go with her because of my lack of trust in her and the positive direction of my life here in Los Angeles. I want my wife to be happy and near her family (I don’t have family to offer her as support), but I cannot even bear the thought of being away from my daughter. I don’t want to be like my father.
I’m torn and distraught. Should I be with my daughter and my wife or continue the path of my calling with the boys’ home among the LA street kids I love?
Please help me think this through, Sugar.
Signed,
Torn and Distraught
Dear Torn and Distraught,
I teach memoir writing occasionally. I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about? It’s a useful way to see what’s there. A lot of times, it isn’t much. Or rather, it’s a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all. You get no points for the living, I tell my students. It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.
This is also true in life. Or at least it’s true when one wishes to live an ever-evolving life, such as you and I do, sweet pea. What this requires of us is that we don’t get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what’s happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.
There’s a sentence in your letter that matters more than all the other sentences: I don’t want to be like my father. It’s strange that it matters since I don’t know precisely what you mean by it—nowhere in your letter do you tell me what your father is like. And yet, of course I understand. I don’t want to be like my father is a story I know. It’s code for a father who failed. It’s what your story is about.
If you do not want to be like your father, do not be like him. There is your meaning, dear man. There is your purpose on this earth. Your daughter is the most important person in your life and you are one of the two most important people in hers. That’s more than a fact. It’s a truth. And like all truths, it has its own integrity. It’s shiningly clear and resolute. If you are to succeed in fulfilling your meaning, everything that happens in your life must flow from this truth.
So let’s talk about everything that’s happening.
Your first obligation as a parent is to protect your child. Allowing your daughter to move across the country without you when you know that her mother is a drug addict who is struggling mightily with her recovery is a bad idea no matter how many grandmothers and uncles and cousins live across town. Until your wife is clean and strong in her recovery, she should not be the primary caregiver of your child. I don’t question the profound love your wife no doubt has for your daughter. But I know addicts and you know addicts and we both know that no matter how wonderful and loving your wife may be, when she’s in her addiction, she’s not in her right mind. For that, your daughter will suffe
r and has suffered. It is your duty to shield her from this to the greatest extent possible.
The struggle your wife is engaged in right now is essential and monumental. Everything is at stake for her. Her ability to get and stay clean is directly connected to her ability to mother your child and remain your partner. Her addiction can’t be cured by a job or a new town, though those things may ultimately play a role in her recovery. It can only be cured by her desire to stay clean and explore the underlying issues that compelled her to become an addict.
I strongly encourage the two of you to step back from the frazzled excitement of a possible job opportunity in a far-off and beloved town and focus instead on the monster that’s hunkered down in your living room. What support and resources does your wife need? What role can and will you play in her recovery? Is your marriage salvageable? If it is, how will you as a couple reestablish trust and connection? In what city would you like to build your life together and what does that decision mean for each of you, professionally and personally? If your marriage isn’t salvageable, how might you lovingly proceed in the direction of divorce? How will you negotiate custody of your daughter?
Those are the questions you need to be asking right now. Not whether your wife and daughter should move across the country without you in the midst of this already tumultuous time. There are other jobs for your wife. There are other jobs for you (much as you love yours, there are boys all over the country who would benefit from your leadership and wisdom). There are other times one or both of you may decide to move back to her hometown or stay in LA.
Choosing not to ask these questions right now doesn’t mean that you won’t ask them later. It’s only putting a pause button on what’s happening in your story so you can figure out what it means instead. It’s opting to transcend—to rise above or go beyond the limits of—rather than living inside the same old tale.