What it’s Like to be an Alienated Child

“Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?” my mother’s voice quavered between a scream and a hiss. Her finger shook as she pointed to the snapshot of my father I’d hung beneath a poster in my room.

I looked at my feet, wishing I’d never hung that photo, wishing she’d leave, wishing I were anywhere but there. I couldn’t speak. I had no excuse for what I’d done.

My father had sent me a letter describing some of his life in the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, and included his image. I was fourteen and had no real sense of what he looked like, so the letter and picture were a revelation.

“Do you?” she repeated. This time, her face reddened as her voice rose to a legitimate yell.

“No,” I rasped. “I’m sorry.” The backs of my eyes grew hot, but the last thing I could do was let those tears flow. This wasn’t about me, it was about her, how much my wanting to know my father hurt her.

“I did it,” she continued, pointing to her chest, maybe her heart. “I did it alone, without him. I raised you and your brother and it was hell but I still did it. He has no right to you.”

I pulled the picture from the wall, a little of the white paint coming off with the tape I’d used to secure it. If I opened my mouth to continue the conversation, the tears would come, tears that would slap, enrage her more.

“I’ve given up everything for you two, and he’s done nothing.” Her voice began to steady.

Removing the picture worked. I’d given her what she wanted. She was right, of course. He’d only contacted either my brother or me once, ever, when we were around seven or nine, I couldn’t remember, my childhood a blur. He had no right to me, to my curiosity, to my desire for a father.

“Sorry,” I repeated. It was all I could manage.

It worked. Her chin jutted downward, affirming her certainty I should tear up the photo, exactly as she’d torn the others over the years, those that had lingered, defying her insistence he didn’t exist.

A few years prior, during one of the weeks-long bouts of depression I’d begun to think of as her “episodes,” I’d descended the stairway in our upstate New York house to find her sitting in the living room loveseat, an album draped over her knees. “Come here,” she’d said, pointing to one of the photos of him that remained.

I didn’t dare more than a glance.

“Everything is his fault.” She formed a tight, phantom gun out of her fingers and thumb and pointed it at her own temple. “If he were here,” she continued, “I’d take a gun.” She pressed a thumb to fingers in an invisible trigger. “I’d take a gun and shoot him.”

My parents, brother, and I lived in Lagos, Nigeria when I was a child. They’d been married for six or seven years before having him, then me. They divorced when I was around four and my mother took my brother and me to Ireland, where my parents had a house in the suburbs of Dublin. From pieced-together stories she shared, some from my grandmother, I gathered she had a severe form of malaria that caused hallucinations and “madness,” as she called it. Her mother came from the States to rescue us and brought us back to live with her.

As far as my brother and I knew, we had no father. When we got older, my mother claimed he’d said, “A child’s place is with the mother,” and abandoned all of us.

I believe this was true. My mother was about his fourth wife, and he’d had four children between them before us. He’d married another woman afterward and had two more with her. This continued for years, his marriages and children, with different levels and reasons for abandoning each.

As a child, I didn’t understand the intricacies or nuances of any of this. All I knew was this father-shaped hole I carried around. As I grew older, that hole got bigger and seemed full of rocks or boulders, something unnameable but heavy. My child-arms were too weak and my shoulders ached with the weight of it.

The weight worsened when his name was mentioned when my mother screamed about him, how he’d ruined her life, how she wished he were dead.

Once, when it wasn’t as bad as usual, when the stable mother who cooked food and made sure we got on the bus for school, the one with the level voice and focused eyes was present, I managed to ask her the most important question.

“If he really were dead,” I said. “If you’d never met him, then you wouldn’t have us. Don’t you want us? Didn’t you want us?”

She’d hugged me and said, of course, we were the most important thing. This made me feel better until the next time she made it clear how painful it was to want anything to do with this devil, this most evil of people, this father.

The problem with forming an understanding of love this way is in the inability to extricate yourself from the part of you that is the parent you are not allowed to love. I am half him, half her. The father part of me had to flee, all the time. It hid beneath overhangs I hoped would crack and destroy this half.

A Siamese twin conjoined at head and heart, severing either would obliterate me, so there was nothing I could do. I had to take the love, this yearning that would not stop tickling my ear with whispers, hammering my chest with pain, and compartmentalize it, lock it in the tightest box, never show it to her or anyone.

The outline of this love, this lack of love, this not-being-allowed to show or access or question this love, is to this day the deepest pain I’ve known. The mere thought of my father, the shadow of his face, brings with it an onslaught of guilt and shame and loneliness, unlike anything I’ve since experienced.

I got my first job at thirteen and saved money to purchase a ticket to Harare, Zimbabwe where he lived, no small sum for a teenager in the late nineties. I hid this plan from my mother and when I eventually told her, she was more open to it than expected.

I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps time had healed her. Or maybe she realized my saving all the money I had just to visit him was a sign I needed some semblance of a relationship. Maybe she understood how it hurt when he refused to provide any portion of the cost of the trip.

I like to think maybe she saw the outline of the absence of that love I so desperately needed, rather than focusing solely on the pain he’d caused her. I like to think perhaps she saw me, and so understood how reasonable it is, really, for a daughter to want to know both sides of herself.

The truth is, though, I don’t know if it was any of these things. Maybe she just wanted me gone for a few months, or was tired of fighting. So I went to Harare, and when I arrived, along with one of my half-brothers from Ghana, we met my father, and he hugged me.

This story does not have a happy ending. His touch did not bring with it what I needed to fill that massive, father-shaped hole I’d carried around for seventeen years. Instead, it was the skin and body of a stranger.

To this day, I don’t know if he felt anything for me, though over the years I visited him many times and got to know him bit by bit.

Once, I asked him if he loved me.

“When one has a child in a marriage that doesn’t work out,” he explained in his thick, aristocratic British accent, “one is always curious.”

So, from a mother who refused to see the part of me that needed a father’s love because she couldn’t see past what this meant for her own pain, and from a father who couldn’t move much past the curiosity about this stranger-daughter from another country and life, I learned the thick, fluctuating outline of love. I learned this through growing up in all these deep and varying forms of not-love, of love that once was, of love that could be, of love that should be.

Of love I was never allowed to touch, kept escaping me, fluttering around my edges, taunting. If there is one thing this taught me, it’s about parental love, especially now I am raising my own daughter after a divorce. All custody orders hold language about not disparaging the other parent in front of the child, but what they should really articulate, clearly, is the reason behind this. It’s one of the most severe forms of emotional abuse a parent can wage against a child, and selfish in ways we can’t possibly know unless we’ve experienced it as children ourselves.

I have. It was torture.