I am not someone who subscribes to the notion that just because someone is your parent you have to love them—or rather, include them in your life. I know a lot of people who do feel this way and I see how that relationship can be a dark spot, a frozen dynamic of button-pushing and overreacting, in an otherwise thriving existence. No one is handing out medals to kids who engage with toxic parents whose utter lack of relationship skills—or perhaps abundance of mental illness—wears away at their self-esteem. Our parents brought us into this world, not the other way around. Not that obligation is necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer mine to be born out of a commitment that I chose, not one that was chosen for me by a broken condom (Joking! Neither of my parents have ever used condoms).
But I have it easy. My dad walked out on my family when I was 11 years old and prior to that, he was much more of a third kid to my mom than her husband (I don’t even think they were actually married). He didn’t work, he never contributed a single penny to raising my brother and me, and at one point, he told my mother she was “too fat to fuck.” So needless to say, the summer afternoon when my dad kneeled down to tell my brother and me he was leaving (in the truck my mom bought him), no one was sad to see him go. Don’t get me wrong, we were sad—just not to see him go. It’s difficult to miss someone you never had in the first place.
So after reconnecting with my dad when I was 26, it wasn’t that big of a stretch to stop returning his calls 12 years later, when I was 37. It was like that episode of Sex and The City when Carrie tries to date the guy who is obsessed with getting married: “He was like the flesh and blood equivalent of a DKNY dress. You know it’s not your style, but it’s right there, so you try it on anyway.” That was how I felt about my relationship with my father; it was just something that I was trying on. And one day I realized, it just didn’t fit.
It was early May of 2014 when he called me from his pre-paid cell phone to tell me he was coming to visit. He lives in a shack with no running water in the mountains of Northern California, so it’s a miracle he has a phone at all. I remember a time—back in 2008—when he ran out of minutes for about two years. Our correspondence was then reduced to handwritten letters where he would tell me he was coming to Los Angeles to visit me “sometime between February and April.” And who could forget the precursor to his first LA trip when he called ahead to see if my apartment had electricity. “Yes, Dad,” I said. “Running water, too. It’s a regular Club Med down here.”
While I don’t remember why my father was paying me a visit this time, I do know that he’s never done anything that doesn’t serve a greater purpose: him. So his visit was not merely a chance to spend time me (his only child out of five who speaks to him). Regardless, he said he’d be arriving in Los Angeles by Greyhound bus from Oklahoma City at 9 am. While that is quite possibly the worst time to drive downtown on a weekday, I wasn’t going to complain. I saw my dad maybe once every two years so I was more than willing to be of service.
But when his bus pulled in to the station at 8:40 am and I wasn’t there, he starting blowing up my phone—burning minutes like a baller just to chew me out for being “late.” His last call came in when I was getting off the freeway ramp at 9:04 and he told me to “forget the whole thing” and that he was getting on the next bus back to NorCal. Three minutes later, I pulled into the bus station and picked him up.
Clad in an ill-fitting three-piece suit, a cowboy hat and boots to match, my dad unstrapped the guitar from his back and threw it in the trunk of my Rav-4. Flashbacks of car-less ex-boyfriends—with and without guitars—flooded my mind and I started to feel sick. It’s one thing to spend countless hours dissecting your relationship patterns in the privacy of a therapist’s office, but it’s quite another to see—with the utmost clarity—their origin sitting in your passenger’s seat. The fact that I was, at that very moment, dating an identically built, identically eccentric and identically developmentally arrested man-child was an irony that was, unfortunately, not lost on me.
For three days, my father sat on my couch, played guitar and smoked pot. While this might seem odd considering I am sober, it’s a great example of what it’s like to be in a relationship of any kind with my father. Since addiction is, according to my dad, merely misdirected energy and a symptom of a weak mind, sobriety is not something he believes in and he therefore sees no reason to respect it. At first this was upsetting, especially when he (without asking) fired up a joint in my studio apartment when I was just 87 days sober. But now that I have gotten to know him better, I realize that my father has never refrained from doing anything merely out of respect for another person, so I don’t take it personally. I used to ask him to take it outside but stopped when I began getting complaints from my sober neighbors about his constant toking. Plus he seems to really enjoy getting high while watching Survivorman.
On the last night of his visit, I took him and his doppelganger (my boyfriend at the time) out to El Coyote for Mexican food. My dad likes Mexican food because it’s soft and he doesn’t have any teeth (okay, he has one tooth that hangs off his gums like a lonesome solider in a battle he has clearly lost). After I picked up the check, my two grown male dependents scurried off to the bathroom together like BFFs. While I can’t think of anything more awkward than listening to a parent of someone I am dating urinate, I let the two weirdos do their thing while I made my way to valet to get my car.
Later on, after my dad went to bed/passed out, my boyfriend (of one month) confessed that while they were in the bathroom, he asked my father if he could marry me. Although this was an utterly baffling phenomenon for a myriad of reasons, I decided to break down all the ways in which the scenario was fucked up at a later time. At that moment, I needed to know one thing:
“What did he say?” I asked, partly amused, party horrified, partly hopeful his response would reveal a paternal side of my dad that I didn’t know.
“He said, ‘Hey man, do what you gotta do,’ ” my boyfriend said with an expression that showed how sorry he felt for me. I was struck with the uncomfortable irony of a girl who could only lay next to a guy like him if she had a father like mine.
I felt lightheaded and exposed. If I was hurt, I couldn’t tell—I could only identify the feeling of complete vulnerability, like someone had taken an x-ray of my psyche and could see all the reasons my life was fucked up. I was so inside out and overwhelmed that I never even thought to ask my would-be fiancé why he would even think about marrying me after four weeks of dating and/or why he would so flippantly ask something so important to someone so irrelevant in such a vulgar place as the urinals at El Coyote. Obviously, this guy was completely insane and my perfect Electra complex-ian match. I made a note to myself to dump him immediately.
The next morning, at 5 am, I was at the North Hollywood Greyhound station dropping my dad off. Much like that summer day back in 1987, I watched him get on the bus to leave but wasn’t sad to see him go; I was sad because I finally understood that I am a truly incredible woman and he may have helped create me, but he doesn’t have the capacity to love me. I am all that I am despite my father, and understanding the fact that he is too warped by self-obsession to even notice, made everything crystal clear.
He called me several times from the road but I didn’t answer. He called again when he arrived in Santa Cruz to let me know he got in safely. I appreciated the updates, but I also knew it no longer mattered. I was never going to return those calls or any of the subsequent ones he made over that year hoping to get a hold of me.
Almost 12 months to the day from his visit, my dad called one more time and left a voice message. He said he understood that I must be upset since I hadn’t been in touch. While his words conveyed that he was at sort of a loss as to what I might be angry about, his tone told me that he kind of understood. I don’t know if this was because he knew he had disappointed me or because he knew that our relationship always had an expiration date. Or maybe the tone was sociopathic and he actually didn’t care either way—but whatever he thinks the reason is, he is wrong.
I’m not mad at my father. That is part of the problem. How do you get angry with someone you expect absolutely nothing from? I realized that I had no chance of choosing a romantic partner who would respect me when I wasn’t respecting myself. By allowing a vapid and narcissistic man like my dad to have a relationship with me when he did nothing at all to earn it and nothing at all to respect, nurture or cherish it, I was basically walking around with a “Kick me” sign on my heart. In trying to cultivate a relationship with my father, I was inadvertently opening myself up to more men just like him. And no offense to my mom, but he is just so not my type.
While I would never regret cutting ties with my dad no matter what the outcome was, there is already a happy ending to this story. Eight months after I dumped my father’s mini-me, I met the most wonderful man I have ever known (well, after a three-month blip with another man-child that ended in a broken engagement—but hey, progress not perfection). What is so amazing is that this man shares all the best qualities of my father and none of the bad ones. He is handsome and lean (like my dad) but stable and sane (unlike my dad). He has light eyes and strong hands (like my dad) but he is a hard worker, a provider and very committed to his four kids (the opposite of my dad). He enjoys music and a nice bourbon (like my dad) but wouldn’t throw his entire life away for either of them (unlike my dad). I love this man for so many reasons, but more, I love myself for doing what I needed to do to let him in (pun intended).
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