things left unsaid

As a boy, walking the dog with my dad, my dad turned to me and without context said, “I once saw a porn film where there was loads of Asian women sitting in rows and the ones at the top were shitting into the mouths of the ones below them, and they were shitting into the mouths of the ones below them. So the most messed up thing you can think of, someone will have done it and filmed it”. This has played on my mind ever since.

*  *  *

A few weeks ago my girlfriend Sophie and me were sat watching TV when my dad came in from a poker night. He made small talk and fed the fishes in the living room then said he had to ask me something. He said some name I didn’t know and asked why I’d removed her on Facebook. I said I didn’t know the name. He said it was the daughter of some cousin I didn’t recognise the name of either and that I’d blocked her online apparently.

“Well what do you want me to tell my dad when he asks tomorrow?” he said.

“I dunno. Just tell her to fuck off” I said with a smile. Looking back it was a shitty attempt at humour.

“Tell her to fuck off?” he said. His voice got louder. “You want me to tell my second cousin’s daughter to fuck off? You’re gonna sit on my sofa, in my fucking house, and tell her to fuck off” I can’t remember what he said after this but he went on in the same way.

I felt rattled. Nothing was said for a long time. He sat on the arm of a chair across from me taking puffs on a vape. After a while he spoke, his voice calmer now. “I don’t want to go to bed on a bad note. I just don’t like you using that sort of language.”

“I won’t then” I could barely get the words out.

He said something else but I ignored this and didn’t take my eyes off the TV screen. He got up and went upstairs without speaking. A few seconds later I started punching the sofa. I needed to let anger out. I felt like screaming or crying but I did neither; punching the sofa didn’t help. My dad came back down the stairs and sat on the chair near me. “I understand you’re annoyed. Let’s talk about it”.

“I’m not”

“Of course you are”. He reached out and touched my arm with his hand.

I looked back at him and felt hate radiating from my eyes. “Don’t. Just don’t”. I moved to show I didn’t want him to touch me. He looked surprised by this. I’d never seen his eyes look like they did then. I just stared at the TV until he went back up the stairs again.  

Once he’d been gone long enough to mean he wouldn’t come back this time the mess I’d been holding inside burst out. I kept saying I wished my dad was dead, saying it so loud Sophie was worried he was going to hear. I sat crying onto her shoulder. She said we should go to bed so we did. In the mirror I saw how ugly the crying had made me look: my eyes were bloodshot and my face was droopy. Like a zombie. I lay there crying for a long time. “Will any of your mindfulness stuff help?Or those videos you like watching?”

“No”

I’m sure from the outside it could look like I overreacted. But I knew why I was crying. Years had just come back to me. Things long buried had shovelled themselves from the ground and attacked me.  

The next day my mum asked if I was okay, I’m not sure if she’d heard everything from her bed or if my dad had explained what happened. I told her I never wanted to speak to him again, that I’d hated him for a long time and I would be better off without him. She started to get teary and reached for the tissues. I don’t remember ever upsetting my mum and seeing this wasn’t nice. She told me she thought that was the wrong way to go about things: she reminded me that she doesn’t talk to her sister anymore, and that her other sister doesn’t talk to their dad anymore, and said neither of these situations were the right way to go about things and told me to give my dad another chance. I said I’d given him enough chances but I didn’t know what else to say. Every direction felt like it was leading to a dead end. I went back to my room where Sophie was still in bed and we stayed in my room for most of the day. My dad came up to apologise later; I let him speak and said nothing back.

After that things went back to normal. My dad chatted away to me while we all sat having tea. There was no bad energy hanging over things. A few days later, after Sophie had gone home, my dad came in and started telling me he’d won his first golf tournament that day. He was very happy. Something about this really annoyed me.

I told Sophie I wanted to tell my dad how I felt. I wanted to say to him things I’d wanted to say my whole life. I wanted him to know I hated him. Sophie said she understood and told me she only really felt like she’d grown up and become an adult person once she’d been able to tell her dad what she thought of him. She didn’t hate her dad, but he’d been a bad guy to her for a long time and once she moved out of his house she was able to tell him this and make it clear her life was separate from his and he didn’t have to be in her life if she didn’t want him there. Getting this out in the open seems to have helped both of them in the long run. She told me to think on it and maybe ask my mother about it but I decided I didn’t want to involve her again.

For a couple weeks these thoughts occupied so much space in my mind there was little room for anything else.

*  *  *

Anger is what I most associate with my dad. Almost every childhood memory I have of him involves him being angry.

Here’s an early memory: I’m sat in my room with my hands clasped together, I’m not a religious boy but I will occasionally pray if there’s something I want, say I really want a toy then I will pray that my mum wins the lottery on the off-chance that this God fella is actually up there and listening. This day I’m praying my dad will die in a car crash on his way to work. It’s not the first time I’ve prayed for this. It was only years later that I realised how insane this was. It’s almost psychopathic.

I have more bad memories of him than I’d have time to write out here, more than I’d want to write out. I’ll just say that not very long ever went by without my dad yelling at me. He’s a big guy, 6ft 5. His shout didn’t sound strained or screechy, it was loud and scary. I’d burst into tears as soon as he began. I’d never know what remark would set him off, what joke he would find offensive instead of funny, what he might misinterpret. He once asked me if I was scared of him and I said No because I was scared he’d yell at me if I said Yes.

I’m out taking the dog for a walk with him and my mum when we come to a high up hill. I’m scared of heights, which irritates my dad because he says I have no reason to be, and he starts to get annoyed at my fear of the hill. When I do manage to get to the top I do a sarcastic impression of his annoyed remarks. He starts to yell. “I’ll knock you. I will. I’ll knock you.” I can’t speak. I make the half an hour walk back to the car on my own ahead of my parents. The car journey is done in silence. When we get back I sit on the bench in the garden until my bedtime so I don’t have to be in the same house as him. It was the same every time: a day, maybe a few hours of not speaking and then things were back to normal, never mentioned again.

I’m bugging my dad to let me have his can of coke. He’s playing the playstation and I must be getting annoying. “You want it?” he says. He opens the can and pours the contents over my head in the middle of the living room. I’m not sure if this is serious or a joke. If someone did this to me now I’d punch their lights out.

I’m playing an xbox game where you control a character on a skateboard. I’m finding it hard and my dad is telling me what to do, which buttons to press. Under my breath I mutter “for god sake” (about the game, not him). He snaps and yells at me til I’m crying. I leave and stand in the kitchen, unsure what else to do. “I bet he was calling me a fucking cunt” is screamed from the next room. I’m unable to breath for the next few seconds.

Like many people treated badly when they were young my mind is quick to jump to dark fantasies whenever I feel mistreated. A girl once chucked a drink in my face in a bar; all night Sophie had to listen to me saying how I was going to brick one of her windows in the night or leave death threats on her phone. My whole childhood and teenage years my dad existed in my mind in this state. Outwardly I likely looked fine with him but inside thoughts ate me up: every remark he made threw me into anger and hatred; every story he told I related how it made him an arsehole; every time he came home from work I’d sigh and a lot of the time I’d try to avoid him.

The university I decided on is around 200 miles away from my hometown. It wasn’t being far from my father that made me go such a distance but it was surely an added incentive. Once I moved there he became invisible to me. I’d phone and check in with my mother but not him. I didn’t give him a second thought. I felt free from him. He might as well have been dead for all I cared.

*  *  *

I can’t say my dad is all bad. The rare days my mother was working and he wasn’t he’d always take me to the cinemas. Maybe sitting in a dark room watching a big screen isn’t a good “bonding experience” but I enjoyed these days.

My dad isn’t evil. He never beat me or molested me like some dads do. But if you are defended only by the things you aren’t then the things you are likely aren’t very nice.

He has a charisma to him. When I’d see my dad with other people I’d see why they liked him. The rest of the family knew of his temper but they never saw the side of him that I was familiar with. On the rare occasion I spoke to the people who worked with him they would sing his praises.

People are different things to different people. He wasn’t my brother, my son, my workmate, my friend, he was my dad and from this view the bad far outweighed the good.

*  *  *

There was, eventually, one point of connection my dad did draw between us: drugs. In my early to mid teens I’d spend weekend nights staying up and watching movies in our living room. The drawback being I’d have to put up with talking to my dad when he stumbled in drunk.

On one such night he asked me if I’d ever taken drugs. “No” I said “have you?”

“Yes. I’ve done a lot of drugs”. He said this with emphasis as if trying to do a dramatic line reading.

He then proceeded to tell me all the drugs he’d done. Now and on many similar occasions he told me about doing drugs from an early age. He said he’d been practically addicted to weed for a long time until he realised he’d been stoned, monged out stoned, for an entire year and needed to stop. He said he’d done crack once in college and went back later the same day to get more but the dealer turned him down worried he’d get addicted. He said if I ever get the chance to try LSD. He said one of the best nights he’d ever had was when his friend turned up at the pub with a giant bag of cocaine and started sharing it out. It was poured in people’s drinks and even the bartender was fucked on it. One of these nights he started to tell a story then stopped himself, saying it was too bad to say, but I egged him on into telling me. He told me the day I was born he’d sat in the living room (where we were both sat as he told me this) with my uncle and their friend and that they’d used a can of lighter fluid to get high. “We put our sunglasses on and were tripping balls on the sofa”.  

I didn’t know what to make of this for a long time.

A long time after this I came back from uni and I’d tried all the drugs he’d talked about. He’d stumble in drunk and we’d talk drugs and share stories. It’s about the most connection we shared on anything.

*  *  *

So for a few weeks I planned out how I would tell my dad and what I’d tell him. I decided I’d tell him on a Tuesday night when he came in from poker. There was a symmetry to that. He had work on Wednesday so wouldn’t be drunk and my mum would be in bed by the time he came in so she wouldn’t have to be involved.

I’d tell my mum I was going for a walk and I’d tour the neighbourhood rehearsing what I planned to say like an actor practising lines. It wasn’t long before I was editing things out and wording things differently to how I usually would - I didn’t want things to kick off and I wanted to come across as reasonable.

The speech of what I’d say to him isn’t something I’d been coming up with just for those few weeks. I’d planned it out in my head for years. I’d tell myself the next time he yelled at me I’d say all the things I had planned, tell him how I really felt, but no matter how many times he yelled at me this never happened. Below is the speech I planned in those weeks, unedited out for any considerations, that I planned to say to my dad that Tuesday night:

“Can you sit down please, I have something that I need to tell you and if you’re annoyed or you don’t agree with what I have to say then after I’ve finished you can yell at me or kick me out, but I think I have the right to tell you everything I’m about to say. My only memory of you from when I was a kid is you shouting at me. You’d scream and yell at me over the smallest things and I’d burst into tears straight away. And this happened all the time. I didn’t know what would set you off, you were unpredictable. I could say something in the wrong tone of voice or look at you wrong and you’d just start yelling at me. And I want you to know that I consider what you did as abuse. You might not agree but I don’t think that is for you to decide. I still can’t deal with conflict well and can’t deal with people shouting, and just in general I’ve had bad problems with anxiety my whole life, and maybe not all of that is down to you but I think a lot of it is. You’ve had such a bad effect on me and I don’t think that will ever go away. I’ve told Sophie I’m not sure if I’d ever want kids and a big part of that is because I’d never want to be like you, I’d never want to treat someone like you treated me. I still have problems now that you’ve caused. And I don’t think you were a good dad to me either. You didn’t teach me how to ride a bike I had to teach myself. You go on about what a great swimmer you were but you never taught me and I’ve always been embarrassed of not knowing how. You never passed on any knowledge to me or helped me out. You just judged me and made me feel bad about myself, no wonder I have so little confidence. And last week you came in, and I’ll admit I said something rude, but the way you reacted was out of line. You embarrassed me in front of the person I love and you spoke to me in a way that I wouldn’t even speak to an animal. I wouldn’t talk to someone I hated like that. You must really think of me as a worthless piece of shit. And I want you to know that from the bottom of my heart I truly hate you, I hated you when I was a kid and I still hate you now, and that isn’t gonna change. And I’m willing to put up with you and talk to you for the sake of my mother, and I’m even willing to forgive you for what you’ve done to me, because I shouldn’t have to carry all these feelings around with me. I don’t want them weighing me down anymore. It’s you who should have to carry them around. And I hope you truly regret what you’ve done and I hope after a long time you realise the mistakes you’ve made but that won’t matter anymore because I’ve got my own life in a different place now and it’s much happier because you’re not in it”.

He came in the house that Tuesday night and I said nothing. We talked a bit, he said some things that made me laugh, he told me a story about someone who had been badly treated at his work. He seemed like a normal guy. Because he is. Isn’t everybody? He was just some guy in his forties. The reality didn’t line up with the grand speech I had planned. The venom and hate I wanted to throw his way didn’t feel right. I realised then that I was never going to say these things. I felt sad at this realisation at first but it was likely a good thing in the long run.

*  *  *

I think people forget the influence fathers have on their sons. I imagine it’s the same for daughters and their mothers. Not that fathers don’t influence their daughters or mothers their sons. But this is a different sort of influence. For a man growing up and trying to make sense of the world, being in the shadow of their father, whether absentee or a model father or anything in between, this influence is inescapable.

I’ve fought the idea that I’m anything like my dad all my life. In personality, temperament, even appearance. To be like him was the worst thing I could be. But I have to accept I’m similar to him in a lot of ways. I’ve got his temper, not as bad as his, but I’m a quick fuse to blow just like him. I look in the mirror and see the similarities, hear similar tones in my voice. I’ve got a liking for drink and drugs like he does. When I look out to the future I see all the ways my life could end up like his and how I’d end up the same person and this scares me more than anything. Sometimes it feels inescapable as hard as I try.

Looking over what I’ve written about my dad here there’s so many things I haven’t put down in words. Memories, feelings, a lifetime of him hanging over me. I could never truly express in words who he is to me.

*  *  *

It was Saturday night and my dad came in drunk. I doubt he remembers any of it: he repeated things over and over and could barely keeps his head up. He was speaking about something else then said “You know what was shit? When I came in here and upset you. And probably embarrassed Sophie. Well, when you forgive me, if you forgive me, do you forgive me?”

I told him I do forgive him. I do, for all of it. He’s some sad sack I couldn’t give a damn about who’ll always be in my life. Like I said, I don’t want to hold onto so much hate anymore. And it’s easier to say “I forgive you” than give a whole speech. I don’t think he remembered this because he asked me again if I forgive him five minutes later and I just ignored him this time. He didn’t seem to notice and went to bed soon after. I don’t believe in the idea of closure, not anymore, not in the way most people think of it. Life continues, nothing is neatly tied up, and even if it seems to it can open back up down the line. It felt nice to tell him I forgave him, but it’s also nice to know he doesn’t remember me saying it.