I Had Daddy Issues

But writing helped me get past them.

I used to hate it every year when Father's Day rolled around. My dad died in 2008, but we never had a good relationship. Never.

For most of my life, I was bitter about the absence of a real father in my life. I felt like an orphan, and that felt like a very deep wound. I was pretty positive that the father I had never really gave a damn about me and I thought it somehow made me deficient.

For the most part, I've been writing every day for more than a year. I feel confident enough to say the daily writing has changed me.

I no longer tell myself sad stories about my being unworthy of love or kindness. And I also quit taking the blame for my parents' mistakes.

It's possible that my father loved me, but he had a terrible way of showing it. Both he and my mother subjected me to abuse I would never put my own child through.

My father was a successful artist and it seemed like everybody loved him. To them, he was a great man, but that person they remember is somebody I never met.

This seems relatively common among famous parents, and particularly those with mental illness. Although I've gotten to the place where I can recognize that my dad was likely not a bad person, I won't let him off the hook for being a terrible father to me.

My dad was bipolar and never once took responsibility for the ways he let me down. Simply telling him that I needed his help was enough to send him into a rage and lead to his cutting off from me for months at a time.

In fact, when my father died, he hadn't spoken to me for at least three months. My dad's final words to me were that he thought I was dirt. He left me an angry voicemail while I was at work, blaming me for a family ordeal I had no part in.

Maybe he felt he was justified, but I certainly didn't deserve for my father's final words to me to be ones filled with hate. Did he care that those were his last words to me? I will never know.

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