The acknowledgements of “Strained Relationships” or that you don’t “get along” with your father are such a victim blamey approach to the problem.
Look. Mainly I have queer folks in my life and mainly we all got shafted pretty bad by our dad/s. Single parents don’t generally stop dating so it stands to reason after first dad doesn’t work out there are going to be other dad-adjacent storm systems moving through.
One of the things that I feel is important to accept to move past the trauma of having a bad father is to accept the reality of a parent and child relationship. We don’t know what a healthy or realistic parent and child relationship looks like. It can seem very weird to witness once you are able to see one. The reality that we do not get to experience is that ultimately the dad is the adult and is responsible for the quality of that relationship just as much as he/they are responsible for your physical well being.
If you have siblings and are closer to my age, please try to take a moment when you are around children to recognize how ignorant they are of how the world works, about how their own feelings work, ignorant of the ways in which they might be being mislead or manipulated. Now recognize how much you yourself have learned about these things. If you are in relationship to a young child, is it clear to you who is responsible for the well being of both of you?
It is. Because it is one of the few human instincts that run through cultures around the planet.
So now that I am 35 years old and I realize that my father was completely responsible for his own actions and thus the environment in which I was raised – it seems really gaslighty to read “affirming” statements about how it’s okay to not have a good relationship with your father on Father’s Day. As if their behavior towards you is something you might be judged for.
Because it always does feel like it’s a reflection of who we are on the inside, doesn’t it? And then a lot of times when you find someone else who outright devalues and insults you you finally think: “I can at least trust that they’re honest and that they see the truth – they see how horrible I am.” Sometimes feeling like we are the bad person is what is comfortable and comfortable can feel like home.
Getting away from my family and finding people who know who I am and appreciate me for that person has been what has helped me the most. I feel proud of several of the things that I’ve contributed to in my community, speeches I wrote that cheered and inspired others, events that I coordinated to provide support to others.
I will never forget the last time I spent time with my dad on his birthday. I was finally passing fairly consistently, had a good job going for me, got a dog, was living basically on my own and making it. My day to day self esteem was okay. I had been able to give some statements at city council meetings and was doing the support group thing. I thought I was doing great.
He met my sister and I at the restaurant and basically watched the tvs while she and I tried to provide him with conversation. He wasn’t ever expected to speak during family life unless he wanted to. You certainly weren’t supposed to engage him and try to draw a response out of him because that just got you a nice dose of harsh criticism. So, hopeful person that I sometimes am, I tried to tell him about how great things were going for me.
I could have been trying to explain … you know a metaphor is hard to come up with. It is hard to tell what he would have been least interested in hearing about because I don’t think my father has ever been interested in a word I have ever said. He simply did not learn that skill in life.
What I am trying to describe is how incredibly uninterested he was in anything I had to say. He was however interested in going to the Coin Op Arcade so he could play Terminator or Area 51 or some gun type game. Having him in a bar where I had been before, in a part of town I frequented just put him in a context that finally I felt I belonged in. I’m not the easiest person to get to know but I do have a lot of people who like me and quite a few who want to be my friend. Most importantly, I wasn’t this unloveable freak whose only value was academic achievement that my dad had made me feel like my entire life.
Turns out, I know how to get along with people, can even be pretty charming. I’m not just inherently unlikeable. Getting away from people who treat you like you are is pretty vital to being able to believe you’re worthwhile without all of the things I had felt I had achieved here.
Because even if I hadn’t made amazingly cool friends or given speeches to roaring crowds, or moved people to tears at Trans Day of Remembrance or made sure there was no depictions of hate crimes at that service, or volunteered for Pride or been there to be one of two people who waited just long enough to catch a trans 18 year old kid at a support group meeting we thought nobody was coming to —-
Even if I hadn’t done much to be proud of I deserve my relationships to involve respect towards me and that includes basic shit like what my favorite colors and foods are. Or not reducing my academic degree to “a woman thing.” So that’s what I expect from the people I share my time with. I think that you should expect that, too. Nowadays we have this idea that people are entitled to access to us because we put who we are on a big invisible billboard. It’s okay to not function like that. In fact, some might say our psyches haven’t moved as fast as interpersonal technology has and it’s ok to lag back.
Bad dads though? Timeless. Have the guts to call it what it is. It’s generational trauma that’s finally being expressed en masse. This attitude that the focus of this phenomenon shouldn’t be on the people doing this damage is outdated. Until you’re ready to tell your friend that he shouldn’t hit his kids stop waiting around the corner for them to become struggling adults who you can have pity on to bolster your own sense of worth.
Queer Pandemic 