The Curse of the Fatherless Daughter
It's an almost impossible void to fill...
Let’s play two truths and a lie.
1. My father died of a heart attack on a New York City bus going uptown.
2. My father was a bestselling author under a pseudonym which I only discovered as an adult.
3. My father got remarried in secret when I was ten years old and never told me.
Here’s the straight-up truth, my childhood was crap. It took a lot, and I mean a LOT of years in therapy to realize that truth. I was convinced that the only awful childhoods were those where the kids grew up in a warzone or had to live on less than two dollars a day in sub-Saharan Africa. My childhood of abuse and neglect? That seemed like a cakewalk in comparison.
When my mother wasn’t drinking, or giving me pot (she’d steep the leaves in a tea to keep me asleep), or disappearing for a bit, she was telling me that I was too chubby, too lazy, or just plain too much to handle.
My father…didn’t ride in on a horse to save me, or take me on my first trip to Paris to show me how a man should treat a woman. (Thank you Gwyneth Paltrow for sticking that in my brain). Instead, my dad walked out and checked out.
He’d promise to show up, pick me up, and spend the weekend with me. I’d get dressed up in a blouse and skirt and tights and real shoes. My father made it to Brooklyn to see me about twenty percent of the time. The other eighty percent, I’d take off the stiff and formal clothes and escape reality by reading a book, most often romance—a genre where the men always show up.
What I wish I’d known in my twenties was that if your parents don’t love you, and don’t show up for you, then you don’t expect the other person in your romantic relationship to do the same.
For years…for years, I thought if someone said they liked me, but continually stood me up, it was a solid relationship. It took me being stood up 5,799 miles from home, as in I flew that far to be told I was unwelcome, for me to realize that what I thought was love, wasn’t.
About fifteen years ago I read a book, Fatherless Daughters. Back then I was married, not happily—never happily—and on a journey to figure out why I was always so sad. I didn’t think my father’s absence had anything to do with it. Even after reading the book, I didn’t think much about him not being in my life.
He all but disappeared for good when I was thirteen. I talked to him once at twenty. Then when I was working for a data analytics service in my late twenties, I looked him up out of curiosity. It’s when I stumbled on a short news story about a man having a heart attack and dying on a city bus. That man was my father. It had happened years before I read the article. The woman he married in secret, collected his body, his pension, and never told me a thing.
For most of my life, when I thought of my father, there was a void. I now think that it was instead me suppressing feelings of loss, and abandonment. I tried to fill that void with adult men who suffered the same affliction of absence. It’s a mistake I think I’ve finally grown out of. Now I’m on a quest to love myself enough to make up for what was missing. It might even work. In the meantime, I’ll keep reading and writing fictional boyfriends, husbands, and dads to keep me company.
Oh, the lie? My father was never a bestselling author. Though it would have been cool to have something more in common than genetics.
Aime Austin is the author of the Casey Cort and Nicole Long Series of legal thrillers. She is also the host of the podcast, A Time to Thrill. When she's not writing crime fiction or interviewing brilliant creators for her podcast, she's in a yoga pose, knitting, or reading. Aime splits her time between Los Angeles and Budapest. Before turning to writing, Aime practiced family and criminal law in Cleveland, Ohio.