For The Person That I Do Have
It all starts with a broken heart, a disillusionment about the statues your youth asks you to revere.
I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, but it’s the truth. We who have ever felt this abandonment from our fathers went through stages of pain throughout our lives we never fully reconcile. We become victims of the ideal of a nuclear family, where the father provides the strength and grounded reason while the mother provides the emotion and the tenderness for this fantasy family. Those of us who only had our mothers around may have grown up to resent that sort of set up, even when we saw a plethora of examples where such a setup wasn’t a fantasy for anyone involved.
Then, we see we’re not alone. We’re OK with having been left, but not with the person who did the leaving … and the title bestowed upon that person.
For years, I held this resentment with me, and, no matter how much I saw him after I became a man, I couldn’t shake the idea that I missed out on all these life lessons from him, and that the void I felt for so much of my life