by JANE COPELAND
The relationship between my dad and I has always been thorny. In fact if I am honest, I would say I have spent most of my life almost hating him. I say ‘almost’ because if I had actually hated him, I wouldn’t have felt the angst I did over what I perceived to be an incredibly poor relationship.
As a young girl I felt my father wasn’t there for me. The encouragement I yearned for was absent, the affection non existent. We had few direct conversations and spent little time together. Only once did I see him show what I deemed to be real emotion and that was when, in the last year of high school I decided to leave my private school and switch to public, he cried.
I would jealously watched my friends with their fathers, putting the sum of their experiences on a pedestal. I dreamed of outings with my father where he laughed and cuddled with me. My anger that this was not my reality had the momentum of a building wave, crashing down on me as I drowned in a sea of resentment.
If you ask my family, they will tell you that my father and I got on badly because we were so alike. Naturally I could not see this fact, and recoiled with horror every time it was brought to my attention, which was often.
The foundations of the unsavory dossier I had created over the years, held the resulting emotional barrier in place. The distance between us grew so great, that as teenager and as a twenty-something year old, if my dad had to pick me up from somewhere, I dreaded it. I felt self conscious driving in a car with just him, and awkward being left alone in the same room. There really was no relationship.
Top Comments
It's incredible to observe from both the article and the comments on it below how many people have fraught or non existent relationships with their fathers.
I have a question, I've been wondering a long time but never had anywhere to ask it.
Does anyone not have a relationship with their father and not care? Mine left when I was two, limited contact for a few years and nothing much at all for the 15 years from there up until recently where he wants to establish some kind of relationship. I'm not very interested in doing so - no malice, but hes basically a stranger. I'd love to know what others would do...
The more children I have had and the older I have grown, the more pigheaded my father has become.
When I do (rarely) see him, I see him trying too hard to be a gradnfather to my children, who dont even know him, and then he gets upset when they dont "love" him back ior respond to his attempts the way he expects.
I find myself becoming resentful as its proof he can 'turn it on' as a grand/father when it suits him but he has never bothered with me, as a child or now as an adult and mother to "his" grandchildren.
Good on to those fathers who have realised later in life that they can actually have a relationship with their children, even if the birth of their grandchildren has propelled them into this realisation. My father never got there, and never will.
There is a big void in my heart because of his absence but it drives me to be so much more to my children, my husband and for me.