A letter to a turtle

Dear Green Turtle,

You write beautifully.  Your first post is a triumph of articulation and emotion which successfully had me in tears.

When I was your age, I just felt so alone and I really remember feeling like I couldn’t share the dark depths of my thoughts.  The scary thing that I have found out since then is that all around me, everyone was falling apart and fucked up!  Some of us just hide it better than others!

My dad finally moved out at Easter of grade 9.  I was devastated.  He was beacon – my saving light against my mum.  We’d sit in the car together and call her the witch.  We’d talk for hours about the stars and the universe.

I was just so betrayed that he left me…  left me to care for my siblings and shield them… left me with the witch.

And the betrayal was because I saw him as dad.  That is all you see your parents as.  They are just mum  or just dad. Now, as an adult and parent myself, i know that whilst my father was being my “Dad” he was also playing other roles… he was “husband”, he was “employee”, he was “President of Rotary”, he was “Son and brother”…  He was also just plain ‘Terry” sometimes.

But I didn’t know these roles, I didn’t care for them.  The only one that I knew was “Dad”.    And the day that he walked out that house and left me behind, all I saw was that “Dad” had left me …

In reality, I now know that the “Husband” left that night… taking with him “Dad”.  And in the year that followed their split I had the misfortune of learning horrible things about my dad.

This man that I love and adored…  he was stripped down to an image of a prick of a man.  A human.  An adult struggling to juggle all the roles in his life and fucking up sometimes.

To this day, I don’t see him as “dad”.  My dad has done some very selfish acts in his life. I see my father for who he is.   I know my father for his adult weaknesses and his flaws, his deficiences and his absolute strengths.   The rose coloured glasses I once wore are no longer there – he is just a man prone to selfishness, caught in his own world, who happens to have kids.

Sweety, you can never recapture that sense of being “Daddy’s girl”.  I’m not going to lie to you.  Like me, you have this fantastic memory of being with your dad and a bond that was so special, many would envy you for having had it at all.

Thing is, your Dad probably doesn’t even know where to begin in patching things and expressing to you how much he misses you and how much he has regrets.  You know yourself, the first step to that is acknowledging… and going through the pain of admitting it… admitting the truth we like to bury so very deep.

It’s just so much easier to gloss over the truth with a story or pop a pill…

I still see my dad now.  But I made the effort… I was the one to bridge the divide.  He didn’t know how.  He was a simple man who knew he had crushed his little girl and I still sometimes now see in his face a look of yearning where I know he is wishing he could turn back time and just have a moment where he was my god.

So with all my heart, as a Daddy’s Girl who was left behind,  as a mother who adores her kids, as an adult who has done healing…  your dad was just dealing with his life the best he knew how.  No parent acts deliberately to hurt their child.  Sometimes, they just get too caught up in their own selfish shit and their kids are a casuality in the that.   But he loves you, and he thinks you are a beautiful and wonderful young lady – of this I am sure.  I don’t think he’d know how to express it, just as I don’t think he’d know how to you look you in the eye and say “I fucked up – I wasn’t leaving YOU behind – I was trying to leave me behind”.

Love him for the selfish, emotionally retarded moron he has shown himself to be.  Love him for the funny loving dad he was.  And give thought to getting to know him as the funny, awkward, but still selfish and emotionally retarded man that he is probably is today.

But more than anything, make note of this feeling for when you are a parent and juggling these multiple roles…  and remember that the to your kids, Mum is the only role you play.  All this pain now is what will make you an awesome mum some day (not anytime soon!!).

Sorry for the rambling but it’s now 3.35am.  I look forward to your next post,

xo