Still Coping With Being A Fatherless Child As An Adult

Today was a bad Father’s Day. It ignited with a screaming argument between my husband and I that resulted in him expressing how upset he’s been with me for the past week. Plus, he brought up how I don’t know what it is like to love a man as a father. 

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

I just stood in our living room while holding our son feeling his words pierce into me like a dull dagger digging through my chest! I couldn’t find the words to speak.

 I don’t know what it’s like to have a strained relationship with my father. I don’t know what it’s like to have an excellent blossoming relationship with my father. I also don’t know what it’s like to have a man who stepped up in my life as my stepfather.

I’m comfortable saying that it’s okay to not know. Accepting the truth of your life can help you heal. I feel a slight bit of conflict. For the past 27 years, I never knew anything about my biological father. I think I know his name. I think I know that he is deceased, but I never found an obituary online. I never knew the type of man my father was, and my mother refuses to tell me anything about him.

My father was the man she married. It was said that my mother hid her pregnancy with me as her first child out of fear. She was 34 years old when she had me. My mother was uneducated, unsure about motherhood, and fearful of what her own mother was going to think of her being pregnant before her younger sister. 

I’m glad that my mother had a healthy birth with me despite her hiding her pregnancy from everyone, including her mother. I made a promise to myself that I would never hide my pregnancy from anyone even as a married woman. I wondered many times throughout the years, what would my father have thought about my mother’s pregnancy with me?

I don’t know for sure how he died or the life he lived. I do know that if he was alive, things would be different. Maybe he would have been a hard-working father who wouldn’t want his wife slaving in the scorching hot sugarcane fields because she couldn’t read or write. Perhaps he would have been loving, understanding, and nurturing to my spiritual upbringing. 

My good thoughts about my father were tainted one day while my mother was reflecting after watching a paranormal episode on Syfy together. She expressed that my father was abusive. At the time, I didn’t know the difference as an adolescent between physical and verbal abuse. I didn’t know how to respond to what someone would label the right words. 

I just sat on the made bed in the room we shared with my legs crossed Indian style. My eyes watered, and my fists and jaw were clenched. My mother then went on to respond to my silence. She said that my father had dirty ways about himself. I just shook my head and left the room without any words to speak.

I’ve always been hushed and shunned since a child for speaking up for myself. My feelings have always been valid and always will be. I am now considering therapy again as I went through treatment as a teenager when I was diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD. I just need that reassurance that I am going to be okay in a therapeutic way. I need the reassurance that my inner child wounds will be healed.

I desire the reassurance that I don’t have daddy issues, and it is not just because I grew up a fatherless child. I want to be able to find ways of expressing my emotions to my husband without it resulting in an intense, overly heated argument. Our marriage is on life support at this time, so keep us uplifted. I hope you had a good Father’s Day, and thanks for stopping by to read. I appreciate you.

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