I am self-diagnosed with Daddy Issues.
Symptoms exist on a vast spectrum depending exactly upon the type of Dad that raised you (or didn’t raise you):
1. Dad was absent by choice – the tired, yet classic cliché of went-to-buy-milk-and-never-came-back. No matter the way that your father abandoned you, the only thing that matters is that given the choice, you were weighed and measured less than what he wanted.
a. side effects include spending the rest of your life selling yourself at a 20% discount and chronic over-thinking (which becomes your comedy shtick in college; it’s more annoying than it is endearing, but we all cope in our ways).
b. my father threatened to leave me in a fit of rage, once. I have since oiled my hinges well so that when he finally does decide to go, the door will closely quietly in his wake.
2. Dad was absent through death – while there are many different deaths and a myriad of ways to accomplish that final sleep, this is simplified to the certain criteria: you had a dad as a child, he died while you were a child, and now you have No Dad.
a. side effects include casually slipping into conversations your Dead Dad, usually while drunk, but always with the intent to have the upper hand in a conversation of trauma; you also relish the sickening gravity of realization hit the other person. Dead Dads come in handy for the nihilist.
b. my best friend’s father has been in a state of near-death for five years now; his strokes come yearly, almost like prescheduled horrors, and we both cry when he forgets my name, forgets how to make cereal, forgets that kindness and patience come before the rage. But he’s missing one-sixth of his brain. Dementia decays the rest of it.
3. Dad was present, unfortunately – people who suffer from this type of Dad come in all shapes, sizes, and trauma responses; it honestly depends on if the Present Dad was abusive or neglectful. Neglect really is just another form of abuse, but it sings a different tune.
a. side effects include the mastery of alchemy; tell me, how does it feel to have a backbone of steel one second, only to transmute it into a few sticks tied together at the drop of a hat? You have steel for others, but not for yourself. Seems a shame, to me.
b. I have seen my friend, Leah, tightrope-walk the line between self-assurance and self-deprecation. The confidence of sunshine one second, until a simple word drains her into cowering, knowing her dad’s anger is swift in coming. I assure her that if Richard ever comes back, I’ll knock his teeth in. Unfortunately, he has more experience than me with hands and rage.
4. Dad was present, for better or worse – the sand upon which I built my cathedral, am building my cathedral, and always will build my cathedral.
a. side effects include holding out my love like a hammer handle-first to my dad so he can choose to either help build my cathedral or tear it down, one blow at a time.
–
At thirteen years old in the early 2010’s, my focus should have been similar to my peers in 9th grade English class: black and white movies were so old and boring, and why do they talk so funny and stupid, no one sounds like that anymore! If it’s such an important movie, then they should remake it to make sense in this century.
Mrs. Anderson closed the blinds and shut off the fluorescent lights, sinking the room into a dank darkness that sent every freshman’s head burrowing into their arms for a few winks of sleep. A few people tapped to games on their phones. Somewhere behind me, a soft snore. I, too, was prepared to ignore the movie, instead choosing to work on the algebra homework due the following class period, or at least, google the answers.
But when Gregory Peck walked onto the projector screen with his casually-slicked hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and stubborn jaw, I was the perfect student sitting at attention. For the four class periods it took to watch To Kill A Mockingbird, my spine stood tall with my eyes transfixed on that screen.
It was easy to imagine myself in Scout’s shoes, to erase her character and insert my own caricature (a prettier, wittier, quicker version of myself) into the father-daughter relationship. Swinging on that porch in the Alabama summer, it was me leaned up against Atticus Finch’s chest as he explained – gently, soothingly, in an understanding way – that if I went to school, we could still read together in the evenings. That deep rumble of his voice, so crisp in the way it cadenced the Southern dialect, eased that knot in my chest I stole from Scout.
At lunchtime, my friends talked about the injustice of Tom Robinson’s trial and how it felt more real seeing it than reading it. Thirteen-year-old white girls picked apart that fictional Alabama trial while we picked which veggies and dressings we wanted at the salad bar.
“It’s just so sad that things like that actually happened,” said one.
“I know,” said another, foregoing the croutons. “Honestly, just so stupid to hate people for something like skin color.”
Our trays clattered on the cafeteria table, sound quickly swallowed by the chattering of our peers. We were still talking about the movie as we settled in for the quickest twenty minutes of our day.
“Yeah, the movie’s super boring, but it’s better than listening to Anderson drone on and on,” said a friend.
“Yeah,” I agreed, mindlessly adding, “but at least the dad is super hot.”
Silence might have landed softer than the laughter that erupted from my friends. Shame heightened my voice and shoulders.
“I’m just saying that he could have been an ugly old man, but he has, like. Good hair,” I said. But the laughter rose, instead, in pitch and volume. A few that’s so weirds tossed into the garden salad of conversation. I focused on googling the rest of my algebra homework until the bell rang.
I stuck to poptarts for lunch after that day and made sure that if my friends were laughing at me, it was because I wanted them to.
If you know you’re the ugly one in the friend group, you might as well dress yourself in layers of humor. Coats of fresh paint cover up old nail holes, but patch jobs done quickly never cover up what is always and truly ugly underneath.
–
Mrs. Hoots assigned summer readings for my AP Language class, the summer after I turned sixteen. Sixteen is supposed to be magic; the first taste of adulthood in the shape of a plastic driver’s license and curfew limits. And with this new freedom, my summer days were spent neck-deep in The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, and The Scarlet Letter. I am still not entirely sure why these seminal works of literature are all thematic in their depiction of affairs. Maybe God was foreshadowing the next few months of my life at sixteen.
That was the summer when I learned that being a good student, a good daughter, and a good person does not entitle you to a happy, easy life.
Sometimes, life is horrible because of the choices we make. Sometimes, life is horrible because of the choices that others make. Collateral damage; wisdom gained at age sixteen is hard-earned. But that wisdom is often ill-fitting, like gloves three sizes too large for your hands.
Dr. Omungu’s office was dark and cluttered; various knickknacks the colors of the Kenyan flag hung from the walls or rested on any flat surfaces. The cabinets and desk were dark walnut furniture that absorbed the sunlight from the window, harboring it like all the dark secrets my dad had kept from us. He and my mother sat on the double sofa while my sister, Dr. Omungu, and I took up residence in folding chairs.
My parents weren’t holding hands.
“You all are here today,” Dr. Omungu began, “because your father has something that he needs to share with you.”
I’d not noticed that Mom’s eyes had been swollen, red-puffed for months straight. She had known this “something,” so now it was just Kaelyn and me who were left in the dark. Kaelyn had her arms crossed like a straight-jacket to herself. I linked my hands loosely in my lap. Unlinked them. Tried to tuck my legs under me, but the folding chair wasn’t wide enough. I crossed them instead. Folded my hands in my lap.
Dad cleared his throat. “You know that I love you both and your mom very much.”
I moved my hands to my knee and held on; an anchor to myself.
His thin lips always quivered and puckered when he was emotional, the loose skin on his chin trembling as he tried to shove the words out.
When someone starts a tough conversation with the words “you know that” and then a truth that you assumed had always been universally known, you start to wonder if that truth had always ever been just a theory, instead.
–
Every scientific theory that we know of, is exactly a theory. Math, unlike science, is possessed of theorems and hypotheses that can always be proved through a system of calculations I can never be bothered to study.
But science, in the grand realm of STEM research, will never have these rock-solid equations. How do we know that the earth’s gravitational pull does not exist in a specific cave in the Appalachian Mountains? The multiverse theory, perhaps the most popular especially in our modern-day consciousness, is particularly enticing. Who wouldn’t want to know what our other selves are up to in their own little universes?
My sister thinks that in another life, she was a park ranger: decked out in forest green with a hat and a kinship with the flora and fauna of the Blue Ridge Parkway. But in this world, she screams at spiders, avoids hiking, and despises extreme fluctuations of temperature.
I hope that in her Park Ranger World, the climate is friendly because we have showed it the same courtesy.
I hope that in some other world, there is a version of myself that doesn’t fear her father and his anger, that in that world her father is patient, kind, and slow to act. In that world, she doesn’t fear the men around her, or their anger.
In another universe, there is a version of myself whose father did not cheat on her mother, whose grandfathers did not cheat on her grandmothers, whose brother did not cheat on her sister-in-law, whose pastors didn’t cheat on their wives; and there definitely is a version of myself who understands that older men, especially men twice her age, should not seek comfort in her teenage presence.
Wisdom gained at sixteen is hard-earned.
And wedding rings don’t lose their grip over one cup of coffee.
–
Richard Reitnour – stocky, scruffy, and smelling like warm cologne – sent me a series of songs the day after I cried in class. Telling thirty of your peers at age seventeen that you had tried to kill yourself a few months ago wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be, but it sure lets you know who cares about you and who doesn’t. I lost friends that day who decided my despair wasn’t worth asking, wasn’t worth knowing.
But Reitnour stepped in and stepped up into the empty space I had left in the wake of my confessions.
Also known as Coach, Mr. Reitnour, or C.S. Lewis Reincarnate, Reitnour taught senior year Philosophy. A legend at Wesleyan Christian Academy, he’d led the Varsity Boys Soccer team to nine North Carolina championships, winning seven. By day in class, he was the middle-aged, laidback “cool guy” teacher that cursed and wore sweatpants every day. The crows feet round his eyes attested to his frequent laughter, and he loved trapping students in philosophical arguments, looping around fallacies like a figure skater.
His classroom was decorated with cheap, glossy posters of theologians like St. Augustine and John Lennox. Reitnour housed that aged wisdom of the ancients inside himself; like he held space for the world in the cracks between his vertebrae and gave pieces of it to the students who needed him.
As a suicidal teenager with a two-timing father and a broken mother, I drifted from the peripheries of Reitnour’s solar system into his central orbit. As a depressed man with a two-timing wife, he was a broken father with two kids. I wasn’t athletic, and I wasn’t a boy, therefore we had no reason to find similarities and connection.
But he sent me songs the day after I confessed that I desired death, and I sent him a few back.
And then he asked me how I was doing.
And I asked him the same.
And soon there were empty coffee cups between us – americanos for him and chamomile teas for me – and evenings of texts that were better spent with friends my age, but my friends didn’t have the wisdom of forty-five years and they weren’t single fathers who loved their children unconditionally and they didn’t stare, unwavering, into my eyes as I confessed every little secret and heartache of mine.
And I didn’t waver every time this man, this father, confessed secrets of his own, his small pains and heartaches.
I learned that when you teach philosophy to high schoolers, you condition yourself to bullshit the truth every now and then. Students aren’t smart enough to set fire to your straw men. And Reitnour threw straw men like candy at a parade to hide that he was all twigs and twine underneath his own skin; pull back the curtain and see that the stage magic was just a puppet on some strings with no hands to hold it up.
But at seventeen, my hands and heart were empty. I needed something to hold on to.
–
My sister had two fathers growing up, as opposed to the one that I had. Two years older than me, Kaelyn was the first-born, the trailblazer, the experimental child whose body smoothed out most of the bumps and potholes so that I could ride in as the second child, the spoiled one. All the mistakes and regrets of her toddler years were avoided by the time I toddled around. It’s easy to follow a path when there are steps to follow.
Kaelyn grew up with two dads: Scary Dad and just Dad.
I grew up with just Dad.
Maybe it was first-born syndrome, or simply her heart was born tender and shy, but Kaelyn learned to hesitate first before acting or talking. Scary Dad and just Dad were identical. Except one yelled first before listening, bushy brows wrinkled up on a rage-red face, a meaty finger pointing like a gun to fire off words too heavy for a two-year-old to hear.
Just Dad had the same red face and deep Southern twang, but he smiled big enough to show his gold-capped molars. We thought it was so cool that our Dad had gold in his mouth. None of our friends’ dads had gold in their mouths.
When he’d have to go away on business trips, Kaelyn and I would crawl in bed with Mom as the QVC channel displayed cheap jewelry and novelty candlesticks. Cuddling was gross, so I laid on my tummy at the foot of the king-sized bed, knocking my ankles together and commenting on the ugly dinner plates the old lady displayed on the screen.
But Mom and Kaelyn, mirror images with their dirty blonde hair and chubby faces, curled into each other like cats, safe havens in each other’s arms.
“Mommy?” she’d ask. “When is Scary Dad coming back?”
Mom would kiss her on the forehead, looking to the empty side of the bed.
“I don’t know,” she’d say. “Hopefully not for a long time.”
But Scary Dad always came back, and he still sticks around to this day, almost two decades later. I grew my skin thick to keep those flaming words of his from reaching my core, but I forget that I am made of the same material the Egyptians used for the Library of Alexandria: purposeful, but never strong enough to withstand.
–
The day before Father’s Day of 2020, I was twenty-two. My father was sixty-two. My parents’ back porch roasted in the June afternoon sun, but I shivered in my skin. Fear likes to lick a strip of ice up my neck.
In my shaking hands, I held a hand-written letter that I’d read dozens of times that day and the night before. My mother and sister both read it, passing on their seal of approval and wishing me good-luck hugs.
I had my car keys poised in my pocket, ready for the great escape. There was an eighty percent chance that my father would register Richter-scale shockwaves of anger. I didn’t want to stick around for the fallout.
I chose to sit in the padded rocking chair; it wiggled and shook with the anxiety bouncing my leg up and down. Wisps of clouds didn’t cover the summer heat, but I tightened my flannel around me. I would be my own comfort, my own security.
And courage opened my jaws, and I began to read the letter to my dad, who I had never said words like this to before.
That I was tired of Anger as my father, that Anger had no place in our relationship, that Anger had no authority over my happiness. His Anger clouded safety; it dictated that my intimacy to my father was a weak and useless creature.
Anger first. Understanding never.
Love remained at the end of the letter. Love, the kind that makes me crave my father’s affection and safety even when he has the one that has harmed me most.
Love, that throws me in his arms when I know he will never understand my sorrow.
Love, which taught me that maybe honesty and courage are better hidden away when the person you love so much does not want your honesty and courage.
On this day, the day before Father’s Day, my father stuck his finger in my face and said, “I will take everything I’ve bought with my own money and leave you right here, leave you all alone, leave your mom and your sister, since you hate me so much.”
“I love you,” I screamed.
“You hate me,” he screamed. “I don’t want to be your dad. You hate me.”
“Please, I love you.”
“You hate me.”
I fled down the porch stairs, grief like a punch buried in my stomach and ripping the walls of my intestines, my liver, like blood in my kidneys and bile in my lungs, I wanted to throw up. I wanted to run away, the way my dad threatened to run away.
But courage and love took my hand and led me back up the steps to my dad.
And I cannot tell you what happened after, what words were said, but I know we ended on a hug. It was like whiplash, so much Anger, to end on a hug. And I walked away, ripping the letter to pieces and grabbing my keys to lose myself in my backroads.
The next day, Father’s Day, my mom came up to me in my bedroom. I had torn the sheets off my bed.
“Hailey,” she said, tenderly and carefully, “Dad wanted me to tell you that he doesn’t want you to give him a card today. He said he knows you won’t mean it.”
I have never been a liar. I am many things, many ugly and beautiful things, but I am not a liar. But when you tell your father you love him, and he believes you are lying…
It’s someone grasping your bloody, beating heart in their hand. With their fingers, ungloved, they peel every vein from the walls of your quivering heart, squeezing the blood out between pinches and pulls until you look at your dead heart in their hand, empty veins hanging like jellyfish legs, and then they look at you and ask,
“Why did you do this to me?”
–
COVID found me at twenty-three in February of 2022, relegating myself and my sister to four days of couch-laying and coughing. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, we watched The Mandalorian.
Pedro Pascal stars as an armored bounty hunter whose heart is as guarded and cold as the metal suit he wears. But one day, he stumbles across an alien child that needs protection from the Big Bad Guys, and the Mandalorian reticently takes on the mantle as protector and provider.
The show is a grand and dramatic metaphor for the idea that families are not always bonded by blood. Pascal’s stoic character transforms from a detached bounty hunter into a father who would risk honor, tradition, and life for this child who cannot communicate with him. There is a peace and a love in their relationship that left me aching.
My sister asked me why I loved the show so much, especially when I’m not a Netflix person.
I said, “I just think Pedro Pascal’s a great actor. And he’s really hot.”
And I’m not a liar, but sometimes I don’t tell the full truth:
I do think Pedro Pascal is a great actor, and he’s also really hot. But I couldn’t tell my sister that I cried over a show where this childless man rearranges his entire universe to take on the mantle of fatherhood for this small child.
Because I know what it feels like to be a fatherless daughter at the drop of a hat, or at least, after twenty-two years of silence.
–
But I wonder, now at twenty-four, if withholding truth is equivalent to lying.
I cannot tell my father that he is the reason for my pain and sorrow. I love him too much for our relationship to be one built on truth.
And so I’ll pretend that I love every part of him, but cry alone when his anger snaps at the strings holding me together, the ones that he made. And I’ll hold onto the moments of laughter, of unfiltered love and adoration that I have for my father who raised me, who built me.
Because truth, I know now, is tectonic.
And that is a bravery I will never again ask of myself.
–
Hailey A. Pierce (she/her) is an emerging writer born and raised in High Point, North Carolina. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where she focuses on memoirs and prison education advocacy. She thinks trees are the neatest things, and her two cats are the lights of her life.
© 2023, Hailey A. Pierce
Halfway Down the Stairs 
Thank you so much for publishing my piece! It’s an honor that this is my first publication. I appreciate it!
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