Daddy's Girl

A Love Letter to Threat, Absence, and the Myth of the Father

MY DAD

It was late summer and my dad was teaching us (my little brother and I) how to safely pour gasoline onto a campfire (there isn’t one). Leaves hadn’t begun changing, yet the dirt road in front of the fire pit was littered with dried cedar droppings and pine needles. He told us that gasoline is extremely flammable, and that the flame could travel up the stream of the pour, into the jerry-can and explode. So, when pouring gas directly onto the fire, you had to splash it, to prevent the continuity of a steady stream from forming. While telling us this he demonstrated, and paying more attention to us than to the gasoline, he did exactly what he had instructed us not to do. In the fraction of a second, as flame escaped up the stream of gas, some primordial part of his brain clicked into action and he threw the jerry-can out onto the road. Flaming liquid flung everywhere, the jerry popped, and the pine-needles too burst up into flame. The whole road caught on fire; low, blue, Dantean, rivers of flame, flowing over gravel. It smelt like boreal incense and burning plastic.

No one got hurt. We put out the fire. To this day, we talk about it and laugh.

My dad was actually kind of a drunk. Definitely a pyro, this was far from the only “eventful” fire we had around that pit. He went to jail when I was really young and to this day my mom won’t tell me why. He didn’t have a license, it was revoked indefinitely after too many DUIs, but he drove to work anyways. He was a stay at home dad for part of my childhood, which is to say that he got laid off and didn’t find work for a few years. In hindsight we were rednecks I guess—semi-rural white people the likes of whom Aaron Lewis talks about living in the woods north of the Mason Dixon. But I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about what these things meant. I hadn’t yet been given any expectations about what a good dad looks like or acts like or does. I just knew my dad; I knew his smile; I knew his presence; I knew his love. And if on the surface he looked a bit rough around the edges, from the perspective of a small inquisitive daughter, he was nothing but a heart of gold.

Before my mom met him he was a coke addict. He lived in Toronto, and traveled working road-crew for Rush as well as other weird and likely illicit jobs that nobody tells me any details about. He was forced to move back to our small town after a motorcycle accident left him bed ridden for months and in the care of my grandma, his mom. Around this time is when he met my mom. She married him on the condition that he stop doing coke, and I think for the most part he did and then they had me. I think from the start I was a daddy’s girl, but maybe even more so than that my dad was a daughter’s dad. All his friends tell me I changed him when I was born, that becoming my father gave him his first sense of purpose, and a new reason for living. People often describe this kind of feeling with first children, however I wasn’t his first child. My father had had one before me, when living in Toronto, which he abandoned; a half brother I’ve never met, don’t know how to contact. I have no clue what his name might be but I imagine his eyes are crystal blue like our dad’s.

Not long after my younger brother was born, he received a diagnosis.

I remember the first time I heard my father‘s cancer. We used to watch The Simpsons on weeknights before bed. Lounging on our big sectional, I would always lay with my head on his tummy. I loved those nights. My ear, warm on his bellybutton, sometimes he’d fall asleep, I loved it when his tummy gurgled, I loved listening to the submerged sounds of his organs worming around after dinner; intestines crawling, heart beating, stomach brewing, lungs whistling. My parents didn’t tell me about the lung cancer or its prognosis until after he started chemo and had lost all his long curly hair. But it didn’t take a doctor to notice the sinister sound of that cough, the way his lungs gradually wheezed a little longer each month. Every night, lying on his chest—no one else on the planet was a more diligent study of the sounds coming from that man’s abdominal cavity; even if I didn’t know he would die, I knew. Maybe knowing was part of how he has stayed so precious in my mind. Maybe I always knew his was a brief and violent flame; only the good die young.

I wonder why they didn’t tell me sooner, at times in my life I’ve construed the delay as a cruelty, but looking back I think it was a great mercy. There was only a brief period of desperation, of making deals with God. Praying like a junkie, placing so many childish promises upon the shrine of a saved father. I will do the dishes for mom, I will let my brother always ride in the front seat from now on, I won’t say a single word during church, I’ll be a good girl, I will make this world a better place, in the small understanding of a 9 year old girl, if only you would keep my dad with me, please.

FATHERHOOD

The lesson of losing your father is that long before the discourse around fatherhood, manhood, and what any of those things ought to entail or to look like, can enter into your awareness you already have an all-consuming experience of life with fatherly love and then a sudden gaping void where once a father was present. You get to know the difference before you’ve thought about what the difference might be. Matthew Gasda meditates on this fatherly presence in his recent novel Seasons Clear and Awe :

“A father was a guardian. Adele didn’t even fully understand or respect that Michael provided this, this tough, skin-like, psychological barrier against chaos that allowed her to be an intellectual and an amateur psychologist, to try to get him to watch Bergman movies and to read Freud and to listen to opera instead of The Band.

His masculine strength and his masculine beauty were largely meaningless to her, and he had to protect himself from her sardonic destructiveness, because if she destroyed him, if she picked away at him, if she did not appreciate the purpose and the mystery and the deep and personal urgency that he brought to fatherhood, if she nagged him to death, the family would collapse around him. All of this he knew implicitly.”

– Matthew Gasda

"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 2

My mom often says that she had to be both a mom and a dad when we grew up. But that just isn’t true. She was never a father, and in fact I think without dad she was all the more subject to the wrath of the chaos around us. Yet our father, even as a dead guy, lent structure and guidance to my own life; he was a good dad, dead and alive.

He had loved and cared for me intensely enough, that after his departure I was left permanently with a kind of watching specter of that care. When I was lonely, I always had the thought that he would be there if he could, not the case when my living mother didn’t show up for me. I often felt that he was in fact there with me. Right after his death especially, I’d hear the door of my room crack open and feel his presence enter my bedroom. Usually about an hour after I’d been put to bed (I have been a night owl as long as I can remember), I assumed he had come to check up on me like he used to when he was alive. These visitations decrease in frequency. He was gone completely for a while and then his visitations began again in my dreams. I grew up in the house that his father had built and that he grew up in; what was our storage room (the “back bedroom”) had been his childhood room, and in a dream form I could find him there waiting for me, a talking cadaver that he put on when I needed to see him.

“like his father, he would one day be sick and infirm, and his own son would reflect on the wreck of what was once his beautiful body, his football body, his strength and masculinity, withered and faded.”

– Matthew Gasda

DEATH THREATS

My dad was adopted. His older brother and younger sister were also adopted. The rumour in the family is that his mother was a teenage girl from another, smaller hick town in the deep woods two hours north. As I grew older, I stopped unconsciously veering away from the cloud of shame which precipitated around the mention of her and began to develop my own cloud of concern and pity: Why had this poor unknown grandmother of mine become pregnant at an early age? How early? Who did this? What had her life been like? Was she still alive? All I could do was imagine, so I have always imagined her with waist length hair, curly and black like my dad’s.

I don’t know how to ease into this subject lightly, but as far as I know my grandfather molested my aunt, his adopted daughter. My dad, as a young teen, couldn’t take it and ran away with her. He began working to support them, and as a result never really got a proper education, nor a real childhood. When you start with this detail the proceeding drug addiction and motorcycle accident, DUIs, jail stints, abandoned child, all kind of come into focus in a different light. He was not too young to act as his little sister’s guardian—evidenced by the fact that despite his age he did a better job than his own father of keeping her safe—but I think he was too young to be so abandoned to the task, twice already.

I never really knew my dad, but in my memory which is also my imagination sometimes I hold him like my own child, in my womanhood and my own impending death I hope to make dream-time visitations upon him in his childhood: crack open the back bedroom door and check up on him while he sleeps through what precious little childhood he had. I want to tell him he is powerful and immortal; a lion who lives in my heart.

Of course, nobody had told me this about my grandfather—not until the drive to his funeral when in the tension of people unable to support their own grief, someone resorted to anger and lashed out, such that the incriminating information was blurted out in retort, as a scandalous condemnation of a corpse. After the shock of it wore off I wondered, as an adult how had dad ever come to forgive him enough that he would let his own children around this man if this were truly the reason they ran away? And in the same moment that the question passed through my mind the only possible explanation followed directly in its wake, having seemed to rise up out of my very bones; I think my dad would have killed him.

Not figuratively. He knew that both grandma and grandpa loved me and that I loved them, but if my grandfather had ever violated one of us, I’m certain dad would have returned to prison. I don’t think his friends would express hesitation or doubt about that. The more I think of it, I wonder if this was necessary to even make this threat explicit or not. Even from a place of ignorance and naivety about my fathers criminal history, it’s not difficult to hold the conviction that he would, which itself suggests that there probably wasn’t much need for him to say it outright.

It took years before I could see this not just as family history, but as an education in threat, protection, and myth. Last year I read Hillybilly Elegy. The way that Vance’s “MaMaw” still lived inside the order of an honor society, it reminded me that you need to be taken seriously as dangerous if threats like that are actually going to have an effective weight, such that after you’re long dead people are still convinced of their truth. I still have my dad’s jail shank. I found it in a box in the basement after he’d died. Did he ever use it? Or did he only need to carry it? A threat is such a supremely human act, it is an exercise in really forceful story telling—a story you tell so truthfully that you hope that it never has to come true. The threat is a loyalty to intention that cuts a boundary through the realm of what’s possible and creates a tough, skin-like barrier against chaos.

DADDY ISSUES

I noticed while spending time with a recent crush that he’d often make hypothetical threatening remarks—that he’d inflict violence on someone under certain circumstances; “If anyone ever did that to my kid…” I found in these moments I don’t respond to him very outwardly. I notice instead my subjectivity kind of warmly recoiled inward, not really thinking but nonetheless holding some reference point to my dad. It goes without saying I loved these little hypothetical threats he’d make, no matter how serious they were, but especially if they were serious—dead serious.

It took a very long history of human introspection to get to Freud. To arrive at the suggestion that we want to make or be loved again by our parents. And as soon as the suggestion was made, it really took off. Almost all of psychology relates our love lives to the forms of love we received in infancy. In fact almost all of psychology relates most of our lives to the forms of love, care and order we receive in infancy and childhood. Although past cultures too were certainly aware that this is a crucial time in life—the son pays for the sins of the father—Ignatius of Loyola is said to have remarked; “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” (Although this attribution, made by Voltaire, is disputed.)

I have grown up thinking of myself as qualified by fatherlessness; as deeply lacking the “tough, skin-like psychological barrier” of a father’s presence. People will often remark that this was probably harder on my brother, to not have a father figure, but I don’t think that it was. Actually I see my brother as having had much the same experience as our dad; having to take up the mantle of fatherly love and protection long before childhood has ended. If this was too soon I hope that it was at least kind of empowering.

Both my mom and I really look up to my brother, he takes care of us in deep unspeakable ways but he also does lots for us, most of all he keeps us from clawing at each others’ throats. I mean the poor kid has a wife of his own now, but still has to reign in two old crones who fight like spoiled sisters and he referees between all three. He does a great job of enshrining a duty of respect between the three of us, considering our temperaments.

He lost his dad even earlier in his life, but my brother had an innate masculinity of his own, no matter how germinal, to rest back on, and he has somehow grown it into a real manhood. But when dad died, the shift left me naked against the sky. I remember feeling like I had to protect my little brother from the pain of it. I tried to comfort him in ways mom couldn’t. But I didn’t know how, I felt like I was always failing, I felt like in the end it was he who protected me from the pain of it. It changed my relationship to both my brother and to my mother, who soon felt like more of a contemporary. Much is talked about how a skilled matriarch draws a family in, but little is discussed about how a patriarch holds the family together.

THE ABSENT FATHER

There is so much we don’t know about the world, but a small slice of that great unknown are known-unknowns. We know we haven’t got all the details so connect the dots we do know and just fill in the blanks.

This is extra apparent within the constructs of a family. They are the closest people to us. The ones we’ve known the longest, the most frequently, the ones whose reality should be for us cold, hard, and factual. Yet it is remarkable how members of our family can remain total mysteries; their histories, their subjectivities, their personal desires—these beings which are so close recede endlessly into the known-unknown, such that so much of what we tell ourselves about one another tends to come out of our own imaginations too much of the time.

This was necessarily very much the case for my father. I had a few real moments—lying on top of, and listening to the sounds made by his actual body, instructions on how to pour gas—so much of the rest are just stories: his childhood, biographic memories from his friends; artefacts from jail and loving death threats; questions of pride; a rumored grandmother; and so many literal dreams, talking to “him” at night. All of these are nonetheless structuring symbols, but I can only imagine them to be true.

The majority of what my father is to me is just a campfire story. Nonetheless it worked: it helped me grow, it guided me through choices, it protected me from despair, it fathered me. It also helped me notice how important these personal imaginaries are. I’d like to argue that what fatherhood is, is mythic, a symbolic force, a world-shape, threateningly cut boundaries that open sheltered space, a protected clearing, a moral horizon for flourishing. We often talk about the self-sacrificing mother, but I don’t think I know any. I know women who break themselves up into pieces and feed themselves to those around them, but none who really self-efface, their behavior is all too present, all too at the heart and hearth of things. I think it is more rightly the work of fathers to sacrifice themselves. In some circumstances a father need not even exist to do his job.

—I remember when my dad finally got a job after being unemployed for so long. I hated it. He worked weird hours. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak downstairs; I’d hide his work boots so he couldn’t leave. He told me it was for me that he left, and I hated that even more. Sometimes what we need tastes so bad.

In many ways the myth we tell about fatherhood is part and parcel to the act of fathering. As daughters of fathers we must actively honor it, even in its violent capacity, because in order for it to protect us the myth of fatherhood must function like a good threat: Sometimes it has to work even when it is not carried out. And when it’s actually driven to its necessary violence, it fails. Biological sex makes no distinction between a boy and man. Female is female. Male is a gradient of boy to man, and so there is an infinite distance between the male and the masculine. When a male can’t protect, can’t open up shelter, he is not a man.

However, it takes two of course. Hermes is the god of the boundaries, he guards the city gates. The city walls which enclose a sacred flame, which the vestal virgins tend. Something about the stories that he left in his wake, the things that his living meant, are like a clearing that his leaving made in the world, where I live in the space that he left behind. In this way he didn’t really leave, because more than just being one of his life’s byproduct or traces, I have interpreted and introjected the tracings of his life, such that I very much am his daughter. In actual fact, I am my father’s keeper, as a vestigial and maybe vestal daughter, I have been the keeper of some of my own fathering.

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

– Sylvia Plath

The greatest gift I got from my dad was just enough to make his absence felt as a visceral presence. He was, most of my life, a constantly felt lack. One that forced me to contend with my own created idea of him; constructs like “would dad be proud of what I am doing right now?”; “how would dad frame this situation?”; It left me with a kind of totem for a characterized and personified ethic: A father is a guardian. So I was raised in some ways by a myth that I told myself about him, which is to say I was raised in some sense by myself, probably not unlike most of us, but maybe under my circumstance a little more visibly so.

A story of what fatherhood is, is imaginary. And yet these things are very real, and participate in the world of the literal; there is a perichoresis or higher encompassing held between the material, the symbolic and the absent.

“Those who practice successfully rely without exception an asymmetrical self-doubling in which the inner other has the association of a superior partner comparable to a genius or an angel, who stays close to its charge like a spiritual monitor and gives them the certainty of being constantly seen examined a strictly assessed, but also supported in case of crisis.”

– Cosmic Louche

HONOUR THY

You know, it doesn’t say honor thy children. Could be because not everyone has children, but everyone has parents? Maybe, but there’s also a direction in which life is bestowed, from parent to child and not in reverse. But at some point you realize your parents are only human. They’re fallible and weak. I know now my dad probably would have disappointed me if he’d lived long enough to do so.

My generation especially seems to have such a hard time reckoning psychologically with the supposed traumas of their up-bringing. They tend to linger on the language of injury much longer than on the language of creation. We narrativize the roots of our lives as a fall from perfection rather than a building up from raw material. We could be grateful for the opportunity to have any traumas at all. We could be accountable to parts of their parenting of which we are the keepers. If you are an adult, then your childhood exists now only as something remembered, interpreted, retold. The stories we tell about our most vulnerable years are powerful—and when they harden into grievance, they can seed lifelong victimhood.

What if the trauma of being cut from your mother, the trauma of being protected by the force and violence of fatherhood are not pathologies but the garden tending of new life. There’s a lot more at stake in these relationships—how they symbolically structure our cognition of and position to the world and others—than being pleasant and well behaved may be accountable for. Perhaps we can not do without forceful storytelling: stories told so truthfully, you hope they don’t come true. Told so truthfully that as they bind us to the world it hurts.

One thing that had never occurred to me before writing this—something I simply could not imagine—is my father blaming his childhood for something he could not do. This may be the mythic father speaking rather than the historical one, but the distinction hardly matters. Adults of our time do this constantly. And perhaps this freedom from childhood—the freedom to decide how one relates to it, rather than be ruled by it—is what adulthood once meant. A release enacted by rites of passage. A clean distinction, not a gradation, between boy and man. The ability to become one’s own tough barrier against chaos; the capacity to honor thy mother and thy father.

Gasoline is extremely flammable, so when pouring gas directly onto a fire, you have to splash it, to prevent the continuity of a steady stream from forming. It’s just built into the game of letting go of children from the embrace of your adult life into one of their own, that it will not occur without that jarring feeling of a sudden drop—the baby bird from the nest.