I think I know where some of it started.
Long before I knew what abandonment was,
I knew what it felt like.
My dad was an alcoholic.
He left my mom when I was a baby and built a life with someone else.
And I want to be careful when I say that, because I do not believe a man should stay with a woman simply because they have children together.
Sometimes relationships end.
Sometimes people are not meant to stay married.
Sometimes leaving is the right thing to do.
But leaving your relationship is not the same thing as leaving your children.
And somehow, those two things became tangled together in my life.
He moved away.
I saw him about twice a year.
Usually for a week at a time.
I knew him in pieces.
Visits.
Vacations.
A few days here.
A week there.
Versions of a father.
But I never really knew the man.
What I did know was that there always seemed to be someone else who came first.
A woman.
Her children.
The life he was building somewhere else.
It happened more than once.
Different relationships.
Different people.
Same feeling.
He chose them.
And I learned very young what it felt like to watch someone build a life that seemed to have room for everyone except me.
Children do not know how to make sense of that.
They do not sit there thinking,
He has his own wounds.
He has an addiction.
He is complicated.
His choices are about him, not me.
Children are not that rational.
They think,
Why wasn’t I enough?
Why didn’t he want to be here?
What did they have that I didn’t?
I don’t remember deciding that those things were true.
I just think some part of me absorbed them.
And then I carried them with me.
But my story with fathers and alcohol did not end there.
My mom remarried when I was three.
For the next ten years, I had another father in my life.
And this part matters because he did love me.
He did choose me.
I knew that I mattered to him.
In some ways, he gave me something my biological father never did.
Presence.
A sense of belonging.
The feeling that I was his, even though biologically I was not.
But he was an alcoholic too.
And eventually I learned another version of the same lesson.
Someone can love you deeply and still have something in their life they cannot choose you over.
He loved me.
I believe that.
But alcohol was always there.
And in the end, alcohol was the thing he could not let go of.
So before I was old enough to understand adult relationships, addiction, trauma, or the thousand complicated reasons people make the choices they make, I had already learned two very different versions of heartbreak.
One father made me wonder why I was not enough to be chosen.
The other taught me that sometimes you can be loved and chosen and still lose to something else.
I think both of those lessons became part of me.
Love did not necessarily mean someone would stay.
Being chosen did not necessarily mean you were safe.
Someone could love you and still leave.
Someone could choose you and still choose something else more.
And somewhere along the way, I think I began believing that if I loved hard enough, gave enough, understood enough, forgave enough, maybe eventually I could become the thing someone could not bear to lose.
I carried that with me.
Into relationships.
Into the men I chose.
Into the way I loved.
I kept finding people who made me feel like I had to earn my place.
Men who were unavailable in one way or another.
Men who left me wondering where I stood.
Men I gave too much to before they had shown me they deserved it.
Men I tried to convince.
Men I waited for.
Men I made more important than they had earned the right to be.
And I don’t think I ever consciously looked at someone and thought,
He reminds me of my father.
It was subtler than that.
Familiarity has a way of disguising itself as chemistry.
Distance felt familiar.
Wanting someone who could not fully meet me felt familiar.
Trying harder when I felt someone pulling away felt familiar.
Loving someone who loved me but could not, or would not choose differently felt familiar too.
I knew those feelings.
I had known them almost my entire life.
And maybe that is why I stayed in things I should have walked away from.
Maybe that is why I gave people so many chances.
Maybe that is why being chosen could feel more important than whether the person choosing me was actually good for me.
Some younger part of me was still asking the same question.
Will you choose me this time?
I spent years trying to get a different answer from different people.
I just didn’t realize I was asking the same question.
Over and over.
There is something painful about recognizing that.
Because once you see a pattern, you start seeing how long it has been there.
You see the little girl inside the grown woman.
The one who learned early that love could exist without presence.
That someone could say they loved you and still leave.
That someone could love you deeply and still have something they chose over you.
That someone could be your father and still make you feel optional.
I think that became part of the blueprint.
Not because I wanted it to.
Because it was one of the first versions of love I understood.
And for a long time, I kept trying to rewrite the ending with different people.
Maybe if this one chose me,
that little girl would finally stop wondering why he didn’t.
Maybe if someone loved me enough,
I would finally believe there had never been anything wrong with me in the first place.
But life does not really work that way.
Another person cannot go back and parent the child you used to be.
They cannot undo what happened before they ever knew you.
And no amount of being chosen later can completely erase what it felt like not to be chosen then.
I think that is something I am only now beginning to understand.
For years, I kept trying to make sense of a wound that had started long before any of those men entered my life.
And maybe part of understanding it meant finally looking back at the person who was there at the beginning of it.
My dad did eventually get sober.
And for a while, I think there was a part of me that wanted to believe sobriety might change everything.
Maybe without the alcohol, there would finally be room for me.
Maybe I could tell myself that the addiction had been the reason for all of it.
That if the alcohol disappeared, maybe the father underneath it would finally know how to show up for me.
But sobriety did not give me the father I had spent my childhood waiting for.
He remarried.
She had children of her own.
And once again, I watched him build a life around someone else.
That was the pattern with my dad.
Whoever he was with became his world.
Her life.
Her children.
Her family.
And somehow, no matter who the woman was or what version of his life he was living, I still felt somewhere outside of it.
That realization carried its own kind of grief.
Because alcohol was something I could understand.
Something I could point to and say,
That’s why.
But what do you do when the alcohol goes away and the pattern stays?
What do you do when the thing you blamed disappears, but the hurt does not?
What do you do when you realize the addiction was only part of the story?
And eventually, alcohol found its way back into his life.
By then, I already knew that alcohol had never been the whole story between us.
But watching it take hold of him again was still painful.
This time, his body could not keep carrying it.
His health began to fail.
There were hospital visits.
Phone calls I was never prepared for.
Conversations that made it harder and harder to pretend there would always be more time.
More time for him to get better.
More time for our relationship to somehow become what I had spent most of my life wishing it could be.
There wasn’t.
My dad was dying.
And four years ago, I brought him home so I could care for him.
There is a strange kind of grief in taking care of a parent who did not take care of you in all the ways you needed.
I do not mean that cruelly.
I loved him.
That is what made all of it so complicated.
He was still my dad.
Still the man whose approval I had wanted.
Still the man whose absence had shaped parts of me he probably never knew existed.
Still the father who had gotten sober and yet somehow never found his way back to me.
And now I was helping him through the end of his life.
I watched him get weaker.
I cared for him in ways I never imagined I would have to.
I stayed.
And I was there until his last breath.
There was no final conversation that repaired everything.
No apology that reached backward and changed my childhood.
No moment where all of the hurt suddenly made sense.
He died as the same complicated man he had always been.
A man I loved.
A man who hurt me.
A man I spent years wanting more from.
My father.
All of those things were true at the same time.
He never chose me in the way I needed him to, but in the end, I chose to be there.
For a long time, I think I believed our story needed an explanation.
The alcohol.
The women.
His own wounds.
Something that would finally make all of it make sense.
I am not sure there is one.
Maybe some relationships never become simple enough to summarize.
Maybe some people leave us with love and hurt so tangled together that separating them is impossible.
I can be angry about what I did not have.
I can grieve the father I needed.
I can acknowledge the ways his choices followed me long after childhood.
And I can still love him.
I can still be grateful that I was there at the end.
Neither truth erases the other.
Maybe that is the part I understand differently now.
I do not have to turn him into a villain to acknowledge what he did to me.
And I do not have to turn our story into something beautiful just because I loved him.
He was my father.
I loved him.
He hurt me.
I cared for him.
And I miss him.
Some stories do not end with everything finally making sense.
Sometimes they just leave you learning how to hold all of it.
