(no subject)

I always think about my dad in May.  May is when he moved out, and for some reason ever since I was nine and noted the one year anniversary, I've always counted up the years in my head -- one year, three years, seven years now -- like it somehow makes a difference.  But I've been thinking my dad more often this May because this year it's the ten year anniversary of my parents splitting up, and I can't really believe that it's only been ten years.  Last year in February it was officially half my life they'd been split up, and I knew it because in a weird way I'd been counting down until I could say that, like somehow them being split for the majority of my life would give me a license to do ... something.  Be okay with it, or move on, or put it behind me.  Stop getting those looks from my friends when I talk about it like it's no big deal.  Something.  And when that didn't happen, I started counting down until the ten year, like that one would actually make a difference where the halfway mark couldn't.  And in a weird way it has made a difference, because I've had fifteen more months to think about things and sort them out in my mind.  It's not going to change those looks I get, but for the first time I know what I'm planning to do with this situation, and I know why, and I know that I'm strong enough to do it.  That does make a difference.

After my parents split up, everyone told me it was a bad thing that good things were going to come out of, and as the years went on they would point out these "good things" like they were trying to justify this point of view to me.  But I didn't need it justified because I don't see it as a bad thing that good things came out of; I see it as a good thing that a lot of bad things came out of.  The more I hear about my parents' marriage, the more I'm amazed it lasted the nearly twenty years it did.  It seems like it should have ended so much sooner, and it's hard for me to believe that when two people so utterly wrong for each other get married, their inevitable divorce is a "bad thing".  But the things that resulted from it?  Yeah, those were bad.  My dad yelling at my mom in garage, and my grandparents sending my mom hate mail, and my dad falling into depression, and my sisters and I forced to go out for an awkward dinner with my dad once a week.  The emotional wounds and scars were bad things.  But the split needed to happen.

I've been thinking about that recently, but more I've been thinking about the awkward dinners, and the fact that I haven't spoken to my dad in four years.  When I first stopped talking to him when I was fourteen, everyone told me that it was fine; I just needed space, they said, and time to work things through.  "But someday," they would add, "someday you'll have a relationship with him."  Even my mom told me that.  Even my grandma.  And I always wanted to ask why this was such a given, but I didn't because I couldn't really justify why they were wrong.  I can now, though.

It wasn't until I was sixteen that I finally worked out why I was so angry with my dad.  In January of 2006 I wrote what I believe is the single most revealing diary entry I've written to date, beginning with the words, "I don’t know why I reacted the way I did to my parents’ divorce."  What followed was a thousand word entry, around the middle of which I was finally able to verbalise what made me so angry: "My dad never showed the slightest interest in me for nearly nine years.  The whole time he and my mom were together he couldn’t have cared less about me.  He didn’t care about spending time with me.  It wasn’t important to him to make it to my birthday parties or plays or piano recitals.  He didn’t have a clue ... who I was or what I liked or anything about me!  But suddenly, after he left ... then having a relationship with me was his topmost priority!"

Maybe the split was a wake up call and he actually did want to get to know me afterward, I don't know.  But to me it looked like a power struggle with my mom, and I was the weapon he was vying for; and even if that wasn't the sole reason he wanted to spend time with me, I do know that that element was still there.  I'm his daughter, and I'm sure he loves me in his way, but throughout the years he's seen and treated me as a responsibility, a duty, a weapon, a trophy, and a right.  He's never seen me solely as a person.

People think that because he's my dad he has a right to have a relationship with me; he thinks that.  But they're wrong.  He isn't entitled to a relationship with me just because we share DNA.  That's something you earn, and he didn't bother trying to earn it when he had the chance.  Sure, I can look back and say that I was a "Mommy's girl", and that I hid behind my sisters, and that I didn't seek my dad out, and that's all true.  But at the end of the day, he's thirty-eight years older than I am.  At the end of the day, it wasn't my responsibility as a three/six/eight-year-old to plan out father-daughter dates.  Cultivating our relationship was his responsibility, and he didn't bother to do it.  And now it's too late.  He's never given me a reason to want to have a relationship with him.  I'm not going to "rebuild" our relationship, as people keep telling me I will, because there's nothing to rebuild; there's no foundation; there's nothing.  We didn't have a relationship to begin with.  And I don't even have childhood memories to incite me to start one with him now.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't have a heart of stone.  I'm sure it must awful to be fifty-seven years old, and divorced, and have three kids who won't talk to you.  But you know what?  It's not my fault that that's how things turned out for him.  Those are the consequences of his choices and his mistakes.  He screwed his life up, and it's not my responsibility to fix it for him.  And I couldn't fix it even if it were!  So I'm not going to be guilted into having a relationship with him.  It's not fair to me, and it's not fair to him.  And it wouldn't be worth it to either of us.