“Confessions of Childhood: 72 Women Reveal the Most Heartbreaking Lessons From Their Fathers’ Mistakes”
(Forgive my english, I´m not native).
Not understanding that you are more than capable of making such poor decisions that you lose your child’s love, trust and loyalty and that they may never want to speak to you again.
– from a daughter who doesn’t speak with her dad because of the choices he made.
When I was under the age of 10, my dad would take me on fishing/hunting trips, etc. After puberty started, forget it. In fact, I remember being 15, and I expressed interest in wanting to go hunting for a few hours. Time comes around to head out, and I go outside just for my other relatives to tell me Dad already left (and took my 16M cousin with him, instead).
For the longest time, I really didn’t spend much alone time with my dad because I felt as though he wasn’t interested in spend time with me.
The gross oversexualizing jokes.
My dad would always always joke about my breast and body, call us virgins or whores and it was always f*****g weird, he didn’t stop until around the 5th time I screamed at him to stop sexualizing his own kids.
Yelling constantly, and then yelling when I would cry. After an hour or so, would apologize. If I didn’t accept the apology, he would start yelling again and the cycled repeated. He apologized with words a billion times but almost never changed his actions.
My dad was so worried about my older brother’s success that my own was swept under the rug. Was constantly told “not to brag” or “show off” about job offers, when I bought my first house, or hit any milestone before my brother. I didn’t speak to my dad for a long time because I couldn’t stand it.
I was invisible, I have not one loving moment with my father. I was never smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough. Just treating me like I mattered at all would have been amazing.
My dad was, in nearly every respect, a wonderful father — *far* more involved than any of my peers’ dads, and he raised me to understand that I could, and would, do everything my brothers did. Nothing was ever off limits because of gender, nothing was “a boy thing,” and he was happy to entertain and foster any of my interests, whether stereotypically “girly” or otherwise. He always made time for me, often at serious cost/effort, but never ever made it seem like a hardship.
I don’t know how common this is, but the one thing I’d criticize him for was being clear that he had a preference for a particular style/aesthetic that my mom adhered to and that I, for most of my young life, did as well — to the degree that I was irrationally guilty and afraid to ever change my looks or style. Like, pathologically afraid to change it. (To be clear, he wasn’t weird or applied any pressure about it, just kind of a “X natural feature you both share is so incredibly beautiful and rare and it would be such a shame to change it.) I still struggle with making noticeable changes to my looks because for my whole life I cared so much about living up to his expectations and not disappointing him, and this was something that got buried in there as a way to be a disappointment.
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