I, like many other unwell teenagers, spent (Spend? Spent.) a lot of time hating my father. I think it’s a natural thing, or, at the very least, a sort of cultural rite of passage. Woman becomes unwell, woman goes mad, woman becomes a feminist, woman hates man, woman hates her father. That might not be an exact timeline, but I think it gets at the general structure. I’m still not sure about the jump between mad and feminist, but it’s convenient for me. The point is, women hate their fathers, or, actually—girls hate their fathers. Girls want to break out of the shell of the sheltered life, fathers wag their fingers saying something like “you don’t know what’s out there,” the daughter stomps off. At this point, it’s all very trite.
Recently, in an effort to be less openly unwell (whatever that means), I’ve started saying that I hate my father, but I don’t have daddy issues. Which, when girls say they have daddy issues, is what they mean. I don’t like saying I have daddy issues because, in truth, I don’t have daddy. Daddy is sexual, daddy is innocent—too innocent, daddy is imminently fuckable. Men, in particular, have a sort of strange relationship with the word daddy, one that is slightly twisted ever so slightly sexual that its subtly is both noticeable and deniable. When men look at me and raise their eyebrows and ask “so do you have daddy issues” they’re really asking “do you have a daddy” or, worse, “do you want one.” My answer is, generally, no; and no matter how many bizarre propositions from any 6-foot-passing man in a dark room do I think I’ll reconsider. Nor do I want to be fucked hard enough to forget my father (which tends to be the other side of the coin). His pain, in a sort of pathetic absolutism, in a mediocre sense of strife, has made me whole. I am his pain, I am our collective pain, I am my father’s daughter. In a sick way, we are the same. In a sicker way, he is me.
But, my relationship with my dad is not sexual. Not literally (although, definitely not literally), but even in a symbolic, Freudian sort of way. I don’t have daddy; I have a dad. A tall, Midwestern, high-school principal, red shirt at the start of a Star Trek episode kind of a dad; well-meaning, unassuming, and generally the same. I’ve come to realize, this image does not coincide with the prototypical “daddy” image, it doesn’t even align with a prototypical “bad dad” image. Which, again, feeds into why I don’t say that I have daddy issue, despite the lack of the aforementioned daddy, there is a spectacular lack of issue. My dad, for what he’s worth, is unassuming. Family dinners these days carry a certain ease to them. Recently, when talking to a friend, I described talking with my dad as re-meeting your ex, four years later after all the dust settles and they ask you “why did we ever break up in the first place,” while you blank stare and wonder about everything that went wrong. Talking with him feels like an affirmation that I truly was just a bratty, spoiled, contrarian teenage girl that I, at one point, declared to hate (it was post-Ladybird, God I hate that movie). I still worry that deep down, my pain is nothing but a coping mechanism for the much realer fact that, as an adolescent, I was not unwell, but rather a child with no real concept of struggle who was just a little bit mad that their dad was mean to them once. This may or may not be true, but it doesn’t explain why I am, all these years later, still angry.
If you were my therapist and asked, really, why I say that I don’t have daddy issues, just that I hate my dad. I’d probably spit out something about not wanting my pain to be perceived as illegitimate. I think society has outgrown it subservient, slack-jawed, damaged woman fantasy or, for what it’s worth, has outgrown admitting it. These women are boring, there’s too many of them, they’re not “fun.” Not that they have to be, but half a conversation in with some dude I met skating in Washington Square Park made a “wrist check!” joke after I jokingly said I have daddy issues (this particular instance was particularly formative in getting me to stop saying I have daddy issues) was enough to put me off the navel gaze-y fantasy of myself forever. That image of a woman wrecked by her father is a punchline for broken, beautiful woman, one that says, “I hate myself, but not enough to kill myself.” It is the long face for when a horse walks into a bar.
But, with the dissipation of the Damaged Woman (capital-D, capital-W), strong, hateful, but vulnerable enough to not be off-putting women have become the new phenotype. In many ways, it’s the same spiel as before, a girl damaged in the “right way.” At the very least, though, you get some condescending, but sympathetic smiles that read “I see through your tough exterior;” which people love feeling, something about being empathetic and then holding it smugly to your chest and if to suggest that their ability to see through you is an “I told you so” card for the future.
I heard a quote recently that fathers love their sons and raise their daughters…or maybe it was mothers instead of fathers? Regardless, there’s a lot of quotes about fathers and daughters. I attempt to parse through it all in an attempt to discern the “cringe” from the “real,” it’s a desperate cloying for meaning in a relationship I fear I will gain nothing out of. I hope to curate the right amount of grief about my father. Perhaps a sexy, jilted grief. Not the eight-year-old kind where I locked myself in the bathroom for four hours to spite him yelling at me. I missed dinner. In all honesty, it’s not the biggest deal. In a world where daughters are killed, abused, and raped by their fathers, I feel a certain amount of luck (and sometimes even gratitude) about the father I ended up with. On the other hand, I find myself wishing that he had hit me. Even if it was just a little bit. I beat myself up over thinking this because truly, it is a bit psychotic. Regardless, my internal justification, a sort of sick victim complex, always hoped that it did happen because then I’d never have to think about our relationship ever again. He would be the bad guy and I would be the victim. I understand that it’s terrible, bordering on pathological, but I feel terrible thinking about our relationship normally, so really, it's just bad all the way down.
Another quote about fathers (well it’s less of a quote and more of a saying) people proclaim that they are their father’s daughter. Which seems obvious until you squint at it. I would say that I am my father’s daughter but my mother’s child. My mother wasn’t a saint, but there was a certain equality between me and my brother. Although, in many ways, I suppose, my mother is a saint. Saints believe in equality in the eyes of God. She’s not religious, but to God, I think, me and my brother are much the same, she raised us that way. To my father, there is less equality, I am a daughter, I am his daughter; my brother, his child. I was treated as such.
I reflect, not infrequently, on what it means to be my father’s daughter. I don’t know. On a physical level, we are very much the same. Which is perhaps why I’ve always struggled with my body image. His body is my body, from his hair to my feet, into our bones. If I was bound to always hate my father, I was also bound to hate myself. I always think of my eye as mannish, brutal, round, but a little bit cutting, if you only stated at the edges that is. I think this because this is how I see him. Even though I don’t see him very much these days. Although, I see him, in a non-literal sense, every day. I meet his eyes when I wash my face in the morning, my hands during the day, and my body at night. Whenever I see him, I am cleaning myself. There’s something poetic about that, but I can’t quite place it.
Although I am indecisive about my indecision. On one hand, I don’t know if I am my father’s daughter. My mom has confirmed this for me (standard dinner table fare is “you don’t have the tempter of your father”). On the other, I know that I have inherited the roll of his r’s and the way he leans back in a chair. In many ways I am my father’s daughter. My body itself is just an apology of that fact, an apology relived 100 times over. Scratching its own itch, picking its own scars, creating new body, slowly, from scratch, that will be mine.
In the same way I was an unwell teenager, I think about becoming a well adult, whatever that means. In my head he comes to my wedding on a smokey cold day and ask “what happened to you, you grew up so fast,” and I will nod, just the two of us, and I wonder the same. I will ask myself who are you, and then my childhood will go away. Like a bad dream. Like a being nice to me when he thought I was old enough to start remembering things and making me move in with mom full-time worked. But it won’t matter to me then, because it’ll be easier to move on, easier to be ok than to fight for my own emotional absolution. It’s reassuring that this will all be a bad dream, that these words will one day become anecdotal fodder at dinner parties I host in my well-adjusted adult life. That’s the idealist within me, at least. The nihilist says I’ll be dead in 5 years. I suppose both are right. I inherited both of these voices from my father, so, in many ways, I hope that they are both wrong.