Newsletter 21: No Dad Club
My dad wrote me an email last week. Out of the the blue. Unprompted. 9 years after our last contact. He wishes me ‘peace and happiness for 2024.’
I had peace and happiness. Then I got that email. I had friends and dogs and Guinness and boats. I had peace and happiness before that fucking email.
There is a pain, or sometimes total lack of pain, that comes with being abandoned by a parent as a child. You wonder what you did to make them feel they could live without you. My dad left when I was six weeks old and I spent years convinced I must have been an explosive shitter. I wasn’t doing much at six weeks old, I had a run in with jaundice but as an olive- skinned man I imagine that would have brought a sense of affinity with me, so iIt couldn't have been that.
To say he left is a slight misnomer. My mum left him but he left me with her. When I meet new people it is often one of the first things I say, “Hey I’m Rosy, fatherless Rosy.” Sometimes they will look at me with pity; my Tinder bio used to be “Low self esteem and a nonexistent relationship with my father” and I would get messages that began “I’m so sorry to hear about your dad.” Other times, my favourite times, I am met with a joyous “Oh my god! Me too!” These are the times I live for because before me always stands a person so miraculous I could never imagine letting them out of my sight if they were mine.
There are two people I know without dads and to me they are just wonderful. The best people. It’s so easy to look at them and know that they are just too magical for it to be their fault their dads aren’t around. When I turn the mirror though. Look at myself, the question is always, “what did I do?”
My best friend and I are fatherless. They are wonder of a thing, funny, clever and astoundingly kind. When we met we quickly established that our dads were gone, somewhere out there without us, and we laughed heartily over it. Who dared to leave us? We would question this and point to our eyes, ears and hands screaming with laughter, “WHERE IS THIS FROM?”
We met by doing stand up at the university comedy society, a cesspit of narcissists and the best people on the planet, and would point to men in the audience and declare that they must be our fathers coming to see us in our element. I had a bit, in my very loose five, where I would speak about my desire to find my dad. “I’m hoping for Pythagoras,” I would say, “But I’ll take any of the Ancient Greek philosophers.” No one would laugh, but them.
To know your dad as well as you know Pythagoras is funny. For me, I really would take any of the Ancient Greek philosophers, because at least then I would know who he was. That makes me laugh. Evidence would say though… it is not funny.
I wrote an email back to him. My dad. It’s an angry one. Fuck you. Fuck off and never come back. That was the vibe. I haven’t sent it.
When I try to explain not having a parent to someone who has two, I explain it in one way. I say, I don’t know what my dad sounds like.
I don’t know how to ask to hear a voice with a message of nothing. I would like him to read a phone book. I don’t want to hear what he has to say but I would like to know how he sounds.
That’s the only way I can sum it up. I don’t know the sound of his voice. I’m scared he will die one day and I won’t have heard it. That’s about it. When I boil it down that’s just it.
Rosy