I was a teenager who longed for a father figure but didn’t know how to reconcile the idea of a dad that I’d seen on network TV and my real dad, the well-meaning stranger. He was in his late teens when I was born and presumably not ready for a kid (hell, I’m 29 and I’m still not ready) and by the time we got to know each other, it all felt a little bit too late. It’s not through any fault of his or mine, it just is. How could I not have seen something so obvious? As I told my psychologist the last part, I went “Ohhh…”.
It had truly never occurred to me that my dad had affected my life in any tangible way because he’d never been there to do anything wrong.
I was speechless and, quite honestly, a bit dumbfounded. In a sort of fake ponder, my psychologist said, “Did you ever think it might have something to do with your dad?”. In fact, my mum’s expression of love is so suffocating that I often wish that she would forget about me and leave me alone. Having been raised by an overbearing single mother, I couldn’t understand what possible childhood trauma might have made me worry that somebody might forget me. In my phone note, under the heading ‘What I want to talk about this week’, I had written the following: ‘I’m scared that if I don’t proactively keep in touch with my friends, then they’re going to forget about me’. It wasn’t over a romantic relationship – god knows I haven’t had one of those for a very long time – but an insecurity that had popped up with regard to one of my platonic friends. So, why, pray tell, am I referring to an idea as outdated as ‘daddy issues’ in 2022? It started a few months ago, when I found myself sobbing at my psychologist’s office. Interested to hear how others navigate the world? Head to our Life section. Do we diagnose longtime bachelors with having ‘mummy issues’? No, we simply call them players and we move on. Blaming my never-ending parade of dysfunctional relationships with emotionally unavailable men on ‘daddy issues’ felt lazy, and honestly, deeply sexist. I’ve always believed that the concept of ‘daddy issues’ belonged somewhere deep in the past, alongside hysteria and the belief that anything remotely column-shaped is trying to emulate a penis. After all, society says that women are often doomed to marry men who remind them of their fathers, stemming a lot from the findings of Freud, aka the daddy of psychoanalytic theory. It goes something like: “I don’t know if I’ve mostly dated tall White guys because I’m a self-hating brown woman, or if it’s because I subconsciously want to fuck my dad?”. There’s a really inappropriate joke that I love telling but I almost never do because I don’t want people to think I’m a freak. “It occurred to me that I’d spent most of my childhood feeling like my dad had forgotten about me.”
0 kommentar(er)
