For Those with Absent Fathers.

Justice Bartlett

Jun 17, 2024

Father, Where Are You?

Oh, how I long to be held by His branches,

bathed in the sunlight of His warmth,

supported,

cherished,

treasured…

Alas, He is gone.

Had I hoped to know Him here,

but perhaps in His absence I shall find myself.

I typically pay little attention to “Hallmark holidays”. They have no cyclical substance to them, and they often add additional pressure to people’s lives which we simply do not need.

Every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day I am reminded not everyone has happy relationships or memories with their parents. For some of us the people who were meant to raise, nurture, and protect us were the first people who showed us how hard, harsh, and cruel the world can be. There is a profound tragedy in that statement, but it is true. For others estrangement over values later in life can leave gaps in family systems which for some are unbridgeable. And for others the actual loss of parents who loved us well, or not so well, is something we would rather not think about on certain holidays or any holiday for that matter.

Mother’s Day is easier for me. My own mother and I have mended much of what was once ruptured between us, and have built foundations in adulthood which simply did not exist when I was child. Being a mother, myself, and also a grandmother, the archetype of mother is something I effortlessly embody.

Mothering is as natural to my being as breathing.

Father’s Day, however is another story.

I am estranged from my father. For several years we did not speak; that was my choice. After some years of blending a personal and professional relationship with him, which did not end well, I continued for a time trying to be the “little mother” to my family, to my father and brothers, specifically, hosting all the holiday meals and twisting myself in knots when my father would find some other priority to spending time with his family. In short, the relationship—and my chosen role in it—kept my childhood wound active until I finally said, “No more!” And in the winter of 2018 I went “no contact” with my dad.

Now, for anyone who has “cut off” a parent or sibling you know this is usually the last straw. We will often try anything and everything before we reach our limits: begging, pleading, ranting, railing… anything but severing the connection. So, when we finally come to the bridge that must be burnt or at least revoked we grieve, but it is also a relief in a way. We finally get to stop trying.

For me, it was raising a thick drawbridge that extended over a moat and withdrawing into my own castle. My father did not lay siege, he did not even send a pigeon. He simply said, “Good to see you are standing on your own feet (finally)”. As if to congratulate himself for finally fully pushing me away. And I stayed away for about 4 years. I did not reach out through the pandemic. I did not reach out when I heard he had cancer. I did not reach out when his first great granddaughter came into the world. I did not reach out to him—and he did not reach out to me.

As time went on my wounds slowly healed. I met some men who embodied masculine qualities which I craved to be close to. I met some men who parented their children the way I wished I had been. The ache for a relationship with my father eased as I found ways to nurture my own inner masculine.

Then one day…I reached out.

It was near Christmas and I was on vacation with my lover at his family’s home. I reached out and got nothing in return, and so I retreated. Then some hard things happened, including losing my 14-year-old pug, so I reached out again. This time I got a reply, and so slowly I lowered the drawbridge a bit and peeked out to see who and what my paternal unit might have become in my own absence.

I was cautious, oh so cautious. Then, as fate might have it, he experienced a frightening health challenge and the child in me, the mother I have always been, and the woman I have grown into all agreed in unison that we flee to his side.

And so I did.

Yesterday, Father’s Day, I sent him a text. Then I called and left a voicemail. Then another text when I learned of the possible death of a mutual friend—someone who was to me a “father figure”, but also a good friend of my dad.

Nothing.

No reply. No return call. No acknowledgement.

It hurts, and this is the hurt I had grown accustomed to: his absence.

Even when he was around when I was child he was not really there. He was always wrapped up in his world, his client stories, a book, a movie, anything but us. At times he would emerge suddenly and with great volatility leaving terror in his wake.

Dad.

With his vast height, booming voice, and intellect that surpasses many a mugggle. He was good with a “cure” as a chiropractor, naturopath, and natural medicine aficionado for many years. When I wasn’t well as a child he knew what to do. But the same hands that could put a slipped knee cap back into place are the hands that were also capable of far less benevolent gestures.

There is still a bit of fear here if I am to be honest. I have been excavating and tending it for years—and there is peace in the space where he isn’t.

Regardless of how we are or are not parented, at some point we must accept our parent’s mortality, successes, and failures and become the parents we needed them to be ourselves, for ourselves, and for those who rely on us.

For some the absent father is better than the father who was there but wasn’t. The father who drank themselves into a stupor, who terrorized their wives and children, or who simply could not be bothered with showing up.

I know this is not all of us. Thank Gawd. Some of us have and had loving fathers, wise fathers, fathers who taught us to ride bikes and showed their boys the right way to treat women, and showed their daughters how to expect to be treated by men. To you who had dads like that: I am a little jealous. I won’t lie. I fear I will forever be “correcting” what was first shown to me about the masculine by the man who should have treasured my heart.

Yesterday I let myself sink deep within. I came into a root that is rotting, something I never planted for myself which is being composted. I can feel it—the decay.

I can feel the slow rotting of something that is not me and is not essential to the way I wish to move through the world. The way I wish to love and be loved, especially. It is a slow decomposition, perhaps most of my life has actually been spent in coming to its deterioration, but it needs to rot. It needs to split, crumble, and turn to mulch. It needs to be reabsorbed by sacred soil. For I know in the absence of this putrid vine, something holy and wholesome will root, flourish, and bloom.

Blessed be to the Father who can truly never leave us, and who dwells within. May He be reborn in me, you in you, in everyone of us who plants His seeds.

Lotsa love,

~Justice

For Those with Absent Fathers.

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