Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

It feels kind of strange writing that. Even more so saying it out loud. I have never called anyone ‘dad’, not even the two men that replaced you when you and mum parted. I always felt a strong resistance towards saying it - not because I wanted to protect your place but because it repulsed me to say it. You were never a ‘dad’ to me, and I hated you for it your absence for so many years - mostly for the confusion that it caused me around my own identity whilst growing up. I didn’t know myself for a long time, but I always knew who or what I wasn’t.

I have felt a resistance towards ‘men’ for much of my life, and I set out to be different to what I had known. Indirectly you taught me a lot, and I am so grateful for the wisdom and strong foundations that were laid in the space of your absence.

Every day, it becomes clearer why I am here. I am writing a new story about what it means to be a man - a man that understands himself so deeply, and therefore everyone else around him; notably my beautiful partner, Darcia, with whom I have the most wonderful and unbreakable connection.

I have often found myself pondering what it means to be an addict. The truth is that we are all addicted to something - it’s just that your choice of addiction was harmful and destructive to yourself and all of the people around you. I wonder if you knew it, too, and if your knowledge led to a compounding of anger and resentment towards yourself. Acts of avoidance can quickly do that, and eventually the pain becomes too great to face. I am glad to have learnt from your example and begun to face my demons early on in my life - before I got myself too deep into love with another and made myself a father to a young man before I made peace with the man inside of me and learnt how love him.

I know now that your rejection of me was never about me - I was just a mirror to your relationship with that part of yourself. I have reached a place of acceptance within myself in recent times, so much so that I can now say that I forgive you and accept you for who you were - wounds, warts, mistakes, and all. The abandonment of your own children was a reflection of the self-abandonment that you’d felt inside, perhaps unconsciously, for what I imagine was your entire life.

I hope, with everything that I have, that you made peace with yourself in whatever way possible before you left this earth. It saddens me somewhat to know that I will never get to voice my forgiveness to you here in the physical world and see your face as you receive it, but I know the depths to which these words are reaching as I weave them here from my mind onto the page. I know that your soul lives on here inside of me, and that this is healing you and future generations through me and my relationship with myself.

I sit here with a depth of understanding of you and the choices that you made - all of which have led to me being here in this form, doing what I believe is the most important work that a man could possibly do, and making different choices thanks to your education from afar. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity at life, and doing your part in helping me to unearth the greatest sense of purpose through my actioned creativity.

It never felt to me like you acted from a place of love based upon the projection of you that I have formed in my mind, but I know that you loved mum in the only way that you knew how to, and that I was brought here through that love that you both created together. It has taken me thirty-three years to get here; a lot of confusion, tears, heartbreak and wandering amongst trees, but now I have finally found it in me to say these words:

I love you Dad.

Sleep well.

Lots of love, from your son, Brad