Dear Writer
A Letter to a Resentful 15-Year-Old Boy
One day you’ll like what you see in the mirror
Dear me,
Oh, dear dear me.
You’re not gonna like this, but I got some news for you:
Very soon your father will leave your mother.
Yep, sucks doesn’t it. This is how it’ll happen:
You’ll be out with your mother, visiting your grandparents. You’ll come home and notice some old gym bags packed and stacked in the hallway.
With textbook child-like innocence, you’ll naively turn to your mother and say: “Oh, are we going somewhere?”
Your mother will say nothing, but you’ll be surprised by the vacant look on her face, like the life had just been sucked out of her. That face will stay with you a long time.
Entering the living room, your father will be sat, looking stern and impatient.
You’ll remember his moustache most of all. All these years later, trust me, you’ll forget his face, his voice, his laugh, how cruel he could be. You’ll forget everything but his moustache — the entire man, in time, will become just a piece of facial hair in your mind.
Big and brown, tinted with red. In the summer sun, it turned ginger. He’d drink milk and it would turn white. All of these things will stick with you, but nothing else.
After you sit down, this is what your father will say:
“I’m leaving your mother. I don’t love her anymore. You’re too young to understand. But one day you will. I’ve packed my bags and I’m leaving today,” and he’ll gesture to the stacked bags as exhibit A of this claim.
Unfortunately, he’ll be right, one day you will understand.
It might seem impossible at first, and you’ll fight it for a long time, but one day that resentment will go, and you’ll understand why he did it. You won’t agree, but that resentment will dissipate.
Don’t hold on to it a moment more than you need to. Don’t protect that resentment like a shield protecting your mother. Your mother will never move on, I’m sorry to say, but you will, and you must. Holding on to it won’t help her and it certainly won’t help you.
Your mother will sob, your head will feel light and your stomach will do backflips. And, I’m sorry to say, you won’t make some cutting comment or tell the man how you really feel about him: you’ll just sit in silence and stare at his moustache.
Then, when commanded, you’ll leave the room and never see him ever again.
But life will go on. At first you’ll say things like “I never really had a father” and “he can rot in hell for all I care” and “if I’m out driving and I see him cross the street, I won’t hit the breaks.”
But all of this will pass. All of this will be youthful bravado. You will realise, in time, that those 15 years you had together taught you many things about yourself. They helped shape you into the man you become. Him leaving was the single defining moment of your character: your coming of age.
One day you will meet a wonderful woman, get married, and she will help you realise all of this. I can’t wait until you meet her. She’s swell.
And one day, you will do something you swore you would never do: you will grow a moustache of your own.
That’s right.
You’ll fight this for years. Go without shaving a few days, look in the mirror and see, with the moustache, your father’s face looking back at you. In anger, you will shave it off to push away those memories, and deny where you came from.
But you won’t do this forever. A moustache frames your face quite well, actually. Really suits you.
But more importantly, you will come to learn that you aren’t defined by the memories of a person no longer in your life.
Your mother will struggle to make eye contact with you for a while when you first grow your moustache out. But she, in time, will come to realise that it isn’t her ex-husband’s face looking at her, but that of her beloved son, his own man, free to make his own choices and not be haunted by the past.
But a word of warning: while your wife will be proud of the growth you have made, she’ll not be its biggest fan. She’ll say it tickles her when you kiss. But she’ll get over it.
And so will you.
Regards,
Me.
