Sins of the Father: My Screwy, Tumultuous Relationship With My Dad

Every year, Father’s Day sucks a little less.

For anyone who hasn’t read through my writing before reading this, you should know that I’m really, really bipolar. The short version is that I was a weird kid in grade school, then in middle school, it manifested and I turned into one of the suicidal 12-year-olds that we all hear about but never talk about.

My parents, being good, forward-thinking liberals, took me to a child psychiatrist to get a diagnosis. After a few years and a few incidents at school, we got the right one. That’s not anyone’s fault — this was the 90s, and mental illness in kids was primarily focused on ADD, so having a bipolar middle schooler wasn’t really much of a thing in the medical community, much less the general populace.

I managed to survive middle school, then high school, after being transferred against my will to a school for messed-up kids like me. Much as I hated it, that school saved me, and I managed to graduate early and go off to college.

Thanks to a scholarship, I coasted through community college without having to pay out of pocket, then moved onto a state school, where I majored first in chemistry, then in technical writing. My parents were content to let me live at home all this time, and even though I got a writing degree and graduated in 2009 at the bottom of the recession, I managed to get a job in my field after about a year.

I moved out a few months after starting that job, renting an apartment with two roommates. One of those roommates would eventually become my wife. Funny how things happen. The two of us bought a house together after moving out of the apartment, and the rest is history.

That was a lot of information about myself, but very little about my father, who is the topic of this piece. I assure you, this lead-up was necessary to get to the meat of the issue.

As I said, my parents were forward-thinking liberal boomers who were not ashamed to have a son with…challenges. It wasn’t something we talked about with people, but they also weren’t shy about it and would discuss it openly if brought up.

They were also a huge part of my support network in school. Without them, and specifically without my father, I don’t think I would’ve survived high school, and I mean that in a very literal way.

Dad was always there to support me. We went on fishing trips, he took me out to dinner and snow cones a lot, and we generally had a lot of father-son bonding time. His support helped me get through the worst of it and thrive.

Sometime in college, or maybe a little bit after I moved out, things changed. College is where you figure out who you are as a person, and who I am is fairly quiet and reserved. I am a fairly textbook introvert, and that includes being overwhelmed by loud gatherings and boisterous people.

Well, my family is full of boisterous people, including my father, and our family gatherings are always loud and often fueled by alcohol (which I can’t have very much of due to my meds and don’t care for anyway). As such, the holidays were a terrible time for me. Christmas, in particular, was miserable, as I had to suffer through two days of parties and drinking and loud, loud people. Generally, the week between Christmas and New Years’ was spent holed up in my room trying to recover my sanity.

What made it worse was that I couldn’t escape. Whenever I tried to get quiet time, my father would drag me back to the group. I was railroaded into running our White Elephant gift exchange at one point, and I ran it every year for quite a while despite hating it. On one occasion, I left the party early in the evening to take a nap, as I’d woken up at 4 a.m. that morning to work, and when I came downstairs after about 11 that night to see what was going on, my father chewed me out for disappearing.

This was the point where things started to fall apart. Around my first year living outside the house, I began talking to my father about how I felt like I didn’t belong in the family because I was so different from everyone else. He reassured me that the family all loved me and that I was absolutely a member of the family. This didn’t sit well with me, but I accepted it because I trusted him.

(Only much later in life did I realize that his assurances didn’t directly address my issue. Saying that my family loves me and I am a member of it didn’t address my feelings of not belonging, it just reinforced my awkwardness because I feel like I don’t belong despite everyone loving me.)

At one point during Thanksgiving, I was texting with my roommate (the one I’d eventually marry), and she invited me to her Thanksgiving celebration. Feeling the desperate need to escape my family, I made an excuse and left to go experience another family’s holiday.

Holy crap was it nice. It was small, only about a dozen people including me, as compared to my family and its 30+ members who would show up each year. We sat around and talked quietly about whatever we wanted — no loud, middle-aged men drinking and telling loud, embarrassing stories. We ate a relaxed dinner around the table, talking and laughing, and at no point did I feel pressured to perform for anyone.

Eventually, I started dating my roommate, and after a while, we moved out in search of a house. My father, a strong advocate of homeownership, helped us look and assisted me with the mortgage process. My partner doesn’t work — they’ve taken a bit too much physical abuse in their life and can’t really perform most job duties. As such, they weren’t contributing financially.

My father suggested that I should have control over where we look and what kind of house we buy, as my partner had “no skin in the game.” At this point, I still trusted my father, so I agreed. I made a token effort to look in places where my partner wanted to move, but my father did a lot of looking where he was familiar and wound up finding us a house about 30 minutes away from where my partner grew up and, more importantly, where all of our friends lived.

My partner was not happy, to say the least, and we had a few fights about it. We’ve long since resolved those issues, of course, but it caused some more cracks in my relationship with my father. He didn’t like my partner, as they don’t work, don’t have a degree, and generally come from a lower-class upbringing. He never admitted as much, but he didn’t have to — actions speak louder than words, after all.

For a while, we would go to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner, and I would go out to dinner with my father for father-son time on Thursdays. After a bit, my wife stopped coming to Sunday dinners, and it was just me.

At some point, we realized that after we got home from Sunday dinners, we would be bickering for a day or two afterward due to the stress of it. Similarly, whenever I got home from Thursday dinner, I would generally be unreachable as I turned inwards and found some distraction or another to clear my head. My partner didn’t really care to lose me so completely into my own head once a week, but that was how it went for a while.

Eventually, it all came to a head. I had been talking with my partner and my friends, and I decided to email my father a list of grievances I had with him and the rest of the family in the hopes we could work them out. I spent months crafting the email, running it by my partner and a few friends to make sure it came off neutral and non-accusatory. I sent it in early November, with the hopes of resolving some of these issues before the holidays. I wanted to fix things, not start a fight.

A fight is what I started. My father wrote back almost immediately, attacking me and my partner and accusing me of starting a fight intentionally. I put together a response, ran it through a quick editing process with my friend, and sent it off. He fired back harder, digging at the various people I cared about and generally attacking anything I loved. After talking with my mother, we put things on hold, and I decided to skip the Thanksgiving holiday.

The next six months are a blur. I talked several times with my mother, who tried to broker a peace deal. I apologized unconditionally to my father during an in-person meeting that my mother arranged at their house; he said he was sorry that I felt the way I did, an epic non-apology that I didn’t register until much later.

I sat through an awkward Christmas morning opening presents with my family, and an awkward Christmas day with my broader family. It was the last time I’d see most of them.

During this period, we were helping my partner’s mother with a financial issue, and we hit a rocky patch in January. My partner and I agreed that I should tell my mother, who I was talking to more often now, about it to gain some moral support. She reacted poorly, insulting and attacking my partner’s mother. I walked out of the restaurant before the meal came so I didn’t have to listen to any more of it, and broke down crying in my partner’s arms when I got home.

Dad was incensed that I could do that to his wife, to my mother, but I pushed back and we agreed to just not talk for a while until after it was all over. I eventually saw my mother again one last time at my house, where nothing was resolved. I wrote an email to them asking for some space and an apology for their hurtful comments.

Dad wrote back, opening with a request that I did not respond to his email so as not to cause any more drama. He attacked and insulted me and my partner while assuring me that the family would take me back if I really wanted to and that they’d always be there for me. He signed off with “Have a good life,” which felt very much to me like “I never want to see you again.” The cognitive dissonance was strong.

At this point, I am broken. My father has spent six months and several emails attacking me, my partner, her family, and all of my friends, calling them all sorts of insulting things, then reassuring me that the family would always be there for me. Attack with one hand, beckon with the other, as it were.

However, I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d been disowned. His words were confusing, and the parting blow, “have a good life,” felt very final. Dad is a bit of a firebrand, so there’s a chance that he was saying this from a place of anger, but that wasn’t any better, honestly. If he would attack and insult everything I love for the sake of scoring a few short-term points, why should I ever trust him?

We haven’t spoken in a tangible way ever since. My partner and I got married a few months after this event, and when I emailed my parents to let them know, my dad responded with “I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could include us.” That was the last meaningful thing he said to me. I blocked his phone number at that point. I didn’t need that crap.

I saw something recently that made me think of this whole story again. The timing was hilariously on point, with Father’s Day having recently come around again. In a nutshell, it said that the people in our lives who want to control us think of us as the person we were in the past when we were most susceptible to their control.

For me, that’s when I was in high school. I was struggling with my bipolar and just trying to survive, and my father was my biggest support. As I said, I don’t think I would’ve survived high school, in a very literal way, if it weren’t for him.

I don’t think he ever saw me as anything other than a troubled high schooler. When I was in college, he imposed his beliefs on me about how I should act and dress. When I graduated, he pushed me to do certain things related to jobs or money. When I was looking for a house, he guided me to follow in his footsteps and buy a house near where his first house was.

I trusted him because he’d been my rock for so long that I thought he had my best interest at heart. I don’t think he was actively trying to steer me wrong, but I think he had his best interest at heart by trying to make me successful in the way he wanted. I was a feather in his cap, and as long as I stayed on his path, things were good.

I do not want to walk his path. In many ways, I cannot walk his path. He’s a loud, boisterous extrovert; I’m a quiet, reserved introvert. He’s the life of whatever party he attends; I’m in the corner trying to not freak out. He’s got boundless energy; sometimes, I can’t even take care of my own basic needs.

And, now that we aren’t talking, I feel free. The holidays don’t bring me endless stress anymore, and I’m free to do whatever I want during Christmas. I don’t drag myself home from Sunday dinners and bicker with my spouse for two days afterward. I don’t feel the constant pressure to perform, whether for my father or my family. I’m free.

Since the crappy response to my marriage, I’ve not heard from him at all. I still get birthday cards from my parents, but my mom does all of it. Sure, they’re signed “from Mom and Dad,” but it’s all her handwriting. He hasn’t signed his own name in a card or letter to me in four years. For me, it just reinforces the sense that I’ve been disowned.

June is a big month for him. He has his birthday, his anniversary, and Father’s Day all in the same month. In the past, I’d get him one card to cover all three events, but I’d pick the most hilariously awful pun or joke card that I could find. He loved them, or at least he said he did.

This year, I made it several days past his birthday before I remembered that it had come and gone. That made me oddly happy, as the day wasn’t tied to a sad memory or a bad experience; it was just another day. Father’s Day is inescapable since there are ads everywhere and my grandmother (whom I still talk to) messaged me to remind me about it. She messages me every year on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to remind me to message my parents. I never do.

I’m not thrilled with the fact that I don’t talk to my parents, but I’m in good company. I have many people close to me that have issues with their fathers and/or mothers, so I’ve got people to gripe with. Most of them are the very people that my father tore into in his emails. It’s funny how he said that they were unreliable, but the family would always be there for me. I still talk to my friends, but the only family member I still talk to is my grandma. Is that ironic?

For those of you who feel similarly to me, or recognize some of my story in themselves, understand that family is what you make of it. There is no shame in being a black sheep; I’ve got a group of black sheep that I congregate with these days, and none of them are blood relations.

If your bio family doesn’t like you, or if you feel like you just don’t fit with them, you are under no obligation to stay — presuming you have the means to leave, of course. Even if you don’t, you can be related to a whole lot of people and never consider any of them to be family. My bio-family is several dozen people, and at this point, the only one I consider to be family is my grandma.

Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are difficult holidays for many, many people. Whether they’re out of your life through death, disownment, or distance, not everyone has a father or mother in their life. That’s okay. There are many, many people in this world who are in a similar boat.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s not hard. It sucks. I feel the loss of my family every year, particularly around the holidays. And yet, every year it gets a little better. I think of them less, I worry less, I am less stressed and anxious. The holidays get easier, life goes on, and the trauma feels less traumatic. It will likely never go away completely, but it is bearable now, and it will get better with time.

I miss my father, and my family. That much is true. But, since I’ve stopped talking to them, I feel as though I’ve truly come into my own as a person. I have some regrets about how things happened, but I also understand that I am happier now for it.

I love my father, and I acknowledge that he saved my life in many ways. However, I do not owe him a relationship because of that, nor do I owe him a relationship because he is my father. He helped bring me into this world, and he supported me in my journey through it, but I grew in ways he wasn’t expecting and didn’t want, and our relationship suffered for it. For me to continue to grow, I needed to grow away from him, and it is for the best that we are separated.

I love my father, but I never want to see him again. It feels counterintuitive, but it also feels right for me. I acknowledge his support in my life while also acknowledging the damage he did to me and the trauma he inflicted, however unintentionally. I acknowledge the love he has (or at least had) for me while recognizing the cheap shots and sharp stabs he made towards me during our falling out.

Ultimately, I feel I am a better person for having separated from my family. I feel bad about how it happened, but I do not regret that it happened. My wife occasionally remarks that she drove the wedge between us, as they never liked her, but I try to remind her that it was going to happen regardless, and if she really drove the wedge deeper, then I’m glad I split sooner than later.

For all the trauma and anguish and sadness that my exodus from the family caused, I am glad it happened. I am glad I am where I am today, and while it was painful, I wouldn’t be here were it not for the split. In a way, I’m thankful for my father disowning me. It has ultimately made me a better person, and for that, I am thankful.