I just read a friend’s very sweet blog post written to her father and it made me smile a wistful smile. I do not know what it is like to have a father in my life because mine left when I was just eleven years old. I’ve seen him four or five times in the intervening 26 years, but that’s it. I do not know him. He emigrated to the other side of the world.

As I sit here trying to write this post I feel so many emotions bubbling in my chest and I have to wonder if i will ever feel okay with what happened. The 11-year-old was bewildered; the teenager was angry; the twenty-something was needy and clung to a relationship, the thirty-something was blindsided by bereavement, hurts from the past following in its wake. But here i am, three years from forty, and i still don’t feel i have healed this hurt; I am still angry about it, more on behalf of the 11-year-old me than me now – me now can look after herself. Me now is an independent woman who feels more fully herself with every day that passes. But there is a little girl inside of me who hurts and i don’t always know how to help her. She will never understand why she was left; she will never understand why he didn’t want to be in her life. As an adult I understand how flawed and fallible we all are, and how becoming a parent doesn’t make you an invincible being who does everything perfectly. I see how the screw-ups of past generations are passed down to each of us, and how we do the best we can with the tools we have; I see how not everybody is cut out for parenthood. But as I near the age he was when he left, i have to wonder how he was able to turn his back on his daughters so easily, choosing to leave the country with another woman.

I guess I will never know the full story, and really it doesn’t matter any more. I worked through a lot of questions with my therapist, but even though i moved through my grief i never fully healed the hurt from so long ago, and i wonder now if i ever will. I do not forgive him. I am still angry in so many ways, more so now when i think about how he missed out on getting to know my sister, and now my nephew. But it is his loss, and the person needing attention from me now is a little blonde girl who’s awkward and unsure of herself; who’s wary of men and yet as the years pass she’ll long for love, long to be ‘looked after’, to be protected. This will never truly manifest, and she’ll discover that the safety she looks for she will eventually create herself. To this day she will not trust the idea of ‘father’ and will not understand the bond a father can have with his daughter. There is a part of my heart that has hardened – I hadn’t realised until this very moment, typing these words.

I don’t wish for a relationship with my actual father, or have any desire to get to know him. I needed a father back then when i was trying to find my place in the world. Now I just wish to find peace in my heart.

Some day.