daddy dearest.
It has been 2 years since I’ve spoken to my parents.
What’s diabolical to me is that I’ve actually fantasized about this exact situation—many times getting myself lost in daydreams of being so disconnected from my family that they eventually become strangers in a far off memory. It’s from those daydreams that I began to understand that peace was possible, without them.
I never really had a relationship with my Dad, so severing any sort of ties left with him (there wasn’t any) was extremely easy. It also helped that neither one of us really ever liked each other. I’ve always been a bit of a feral cat and I think he recognized early on I wasn’t going to be tamed so he cut his loses and channeled his efforts elsewhere.
I considered him to be the type of parent who should’ve never been a parent, if you know what I mean. The absolute lack of interest in anything we did growing up and the sheer inability to remember anything about us outside of our names was very obvious at a young age. (There was also the fact that he was totally absent.)
What I realize now is that he was a fragile man—keeping my mother in an oppressive rotation of pregnant, birthing, or nursing for nearly a decade in order to keep his ego afloat and give off the appearance of being a family man.