The Father Wound

Essay 13

November 2, 2024

The father wound is real ya’ll.  I have been struggling with it for years and realizing more and more ways that it impacts me and influences my behavior.  I wish I could figure out how to heal it once and for all.  Each time I think I have addressed the wound and uncovered the last of my pain, a new situation brings it to the surface.  Healing truly is a lifetime journey.

My father was wonderful in many ways.  Mainly in the lessons and skills he taught me.  I attribute my success as a businesswoman to the work ethic he instilled in me.  From a young age, we had chores around the house and contributed to the household.  I set the dinner table every night for the family, cleaned my bedroom, helped my father clean his truck on Sundays, and helped him plant and tend to our small garden in the back yard.  There was no free ride.  He also taught me the value of a dollar, something many people have forgotten.  When I wanted extra money, my father would tell me to call my grandfather to ask what odd jobs he needed help with.  I helped him clean his garage out, do yard work, or wash and wax vehicles.  He always paid me well, but he also expected quality work.  I quickly learned that money was earned, and usually the harder you worked, the more money you received.  The same has essentially been true for me as an adult.

My father also taught me many skills, as a child growing up in a rural area, that I have noticed my counterparts from the city just don’t have.  My father was an outdoorsman and a teacher at heart.  When I was very young, he would take me with him everywhere, and he was always eager to teach me what he knew.  He was great at explaining the “why” behind everything.

“If you ever get lost in the woods, look for the side of the tree with moss on it.  Moss usually grows on the North side of the tree because that side gets less sunlight.  If you find the side with moss, you always know which way is North,” he once told me when we were out in the woods.  So many of those lessons are burned in my mind.

I joke with my wife that if we were ever stranded in the wilderness, I’m the only one of our friends who would know how to survive.  I know how to build a fire and understand the importance of using dry wood, small pieces of kindling to start it out, and using nothing green.  I chuckle every time we have a bonfire with our city friends, and I watch them struggle to keep the fire lit using only large pieces of slightly damp wood and lighter fluid.  I also have a great sense of direction.  My father taught me how to use landmarks as well as the sun’s placement on the horizon and time of day as indicators of direction.  Once he even tested me.  I couldn’t have been more than 9 years old when we were driving around in his truck together.

“Okay, tell me how to get home from here,” he announced out of nowhere.

“I don’t know!” I said, surprised at the request.

“Sure you do!  Use your skills.  Tell me which way to turn, and we’ll see if you know,” he said calmly, knowing he was going to enjoy this game.

I didn’t figure out how to get us home that day without his help, but it was a good lesson to always pay attention to your surroundings.  You never know when you’ll need to figure out your way home.

The skills my father taught me have helped me to live a life of independence.  I have never really had to depend on anyone since the age of 18.  I have always known how to make enough money to support myself, and I have had the life skills to handle scenarios on my own when they arise, whether it be a flat tire, a broken toilet, or how to do my taxes.  Having basic skills, plus common sense to navigate new situations, has given me the confidence to rely only on me.  For that, I am grateful.

Despite everything my father taught me, the one thing he wasn’t good at was emotions.  “Stop that crying, or I’m gonna give you something to cry about!” was a phrase I regularly heard in my home.  I have always been a very sensitive person, and especially as a child, my feelings were easily hurt.  My father is also an impatient man, so when someone doesn’t move quickly enough for him, or if they don’t do something in exactly the way he wants, he gets irritated, and it comes out in his tone of voice.  It is common for him to bark orders at people.  As a sensitive child, his harsh tone would cause tears to well up in my eyes all too frequently which would only anger him more.  When he would yell at me to stop crying, all I could think was “I can’t!”, and I would usually just cry harder.  I tried my best to hold my breath and not make noise.  For many years, as a teenager and then an adult, I refused to cry in front of anyone.  I was embarrassed by it and viewed it as a sign of weakness.  Thankfully, I have since overcome that.  I also became a perfectionist, overworking myself to get ahead of any criticism.

My father didn’t understand or deal with his own emotions, so he certainly didn’t know how to deal with a little girl’s emotions in a healthy manner.  During my teen years, it only got worse.  There was a distinct point in time when my relationship with my father changed, around the age of 12.  Before that, I viewed my father as an authority figure not to be challenged.  He was the boss, and I had to listen to him.  As I got older, and especially as I began to note the gender roles in my household, I started to notice things I didn’t like, and I viewed him as a controlling figure.

“Mom, why does dad get to come home from work and sit and watch tv all evening, and you come home and still have cook dinner and clean the kitchen?  That’s not fair.”  I would frequently ask.

“Your dad’s job is the outside of the house, and my job is the inside.  That’s what we do.” My mom shared.

“But he doesn’t have to do that every day.  He just does yardwork on the weekends.”  I would challenge back.  My mom would usually just look at me a little disappointed and shrug, as if she already knew that.

Most evenings I would sit in the kitchen and do my homework while my mom cooked dinner.  I would stop to watch her, and we would have little chats.  That was our time for just us.  Repeatedly, over the years, my mom instilled in me, “Never depend on a man for money.  Always make your own money.”  It didn’t occur to me until years later, but I think she shared that advice on the days when she was most frustrated with my father, and that was the advice that she wished someone had told her as a young girl.

The more I noticed the things I didn’t like about how my father acted or how he treated my mother, the bolder I became in how I dealt with him.

“I told you yesterday I need those brown pants washed for work tomorrow!” my dad yelled across the house at my mom.

I looked at him annoyed and said, “You can’t do your own laundry?”

“You watch your mouth, and stay out of it,” he snapped at me with daggers in his eyes.

Something in me would always push me to keep going, knowing it was a bad idea.  I think I was sad that my mother didn’t stand up for herself more, so I said all the things I wished she would say.  More often than not, it would result in me getting slapped across the face by father’s giant hand.  I would spend the rest of the evening alone in my room crying.

When I became an adult and started making my own life choices, which my father usually didn’t like, it’s like he decided that his job as a father was done.  It was as if fatherhood ended at the age of 18 when I left home.  He saw it as my responsibility to reach out or visit.  I lived in three different apartments throughout my 20s, within a 30-minute drive of him, and I don’t ever remember him visiting once.  Then, when I moved to Chicago and rarely visited, the already infrequent phone calls stopped too.  I only remember one year that I received a phone call on my birthday from him.  It felt strange because my mom and I were always texting, talking on the phone, or video chatting.  We connected sometimes daily but no less than once a week.  I could often hear him talking in the background, but he would never ask to speak to me.

Maybe abandonment is the wound that I feel.  At the very least, emotional neglect.  My feelings were never validated by my father.  In fact, many times, they were even mocked.  “Oh poor you.  You have it so rough,” I often heard when I expressed any dissatisfaction or sadness.  Those behaviors showed up in relationships with partners who were emotionally abusive and selfish.  So many times throughout my life, I talked myself out of my own feelings and then blamed myself.  I also haven’t felt loved by my father in many years.  In fact, I feel invisible to him.  It has affected my ability to fully love and accept myself and to realize my importance in this world.

Now that I am in a healthy, stable relationship and have finally learned how to communicate my feelings and boundaries at home, I see the similar behaviors show up most recently in my boss.  Any time I express my dissatisfaction, it seems that he looks for a way to talk me out of my feelings, to minimize the issue, to tell me why I am wrong in viewing the matter that way.  His behavior never changes, and nothing truly gets resolved.

It’s funny how life continues to mirror my issues back to me.  Each time, I look for different, more healthy ways to navigate the circumstances.  There is clearly still something left to learn and heal.  I can only hope that I can continue to heal, to lessen the impacts over time, and to give myself the love that I didn’t receive.

Love,

Phoenix Rising