Daughters

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There was a time I was listening to a lot of John Mayer. A lot. The whole of 2012, and bits of 2013, just Mayer. I was suffering from loss. I wasn’t eating well and when I mustered appetite I was eating Stop This Train, or Dreaming With a Broken Heart, Edge of Desire, Heart of LIfe, and Free Fallin’. I knew his album, “Continuum”, by heart. There are songs in “Battle Studies” that I felt he wrote while placing a stethoscope against my chest, listening to my heart. His lingering guitar was full of darkness, longing and loss. It was like following a sound in pitch darkness. There were ghosts in his lyrics, my ghosts. All of John Mayer’s songs seemed to veer towards tragedy. And who doesn’t like tragedy? There is such character in tragedy. Such great learning and yearning. I loved it when his songs revealed me, exposed me and left me without clothes. 

There is one of his songs, Daughters where he says: Fathers be good to your daughters/ Daughters will love like you do/ Girls become lovers who turn into mothers..

This week’s story reminds me of this song. How the love we receive becomes the love we give, and how music sometimes understands us better than we understand ourselves.

***

By Anonymous

I used to think that if I was quieter, smaller, less demanding, easier to love, then maybe I would be enough to be someone’s someone. I can’t remember when it all started, this fascination. Perhaps as young as a toddler – this sense that I was waiting for someone to say ‘yes, it’s you that I want.’ Many things contributed to this feeling, but one did the most. My father was never really there. Not in the way I wanted. Not in the way that mattered. When I saw other kids with their fathers, it fascinated me. This strong male presence intrigued me. I wanted presence, craved it. But I only got it through books and movies and watching other fathers.

On school visiting days, I watched as other kids used their dads as monkey bars, swinging with joy and pride. I stared and studied and dreamt of such moments. I wanted my father. It was unfair to my mum who I know really tried to fill the gap. She knew I wanted that father’s presence. I asked and prodded and nagged; Where is he? Is he coming soon? What did he say? Did he buy me something? Did you see him? Her answers were short and dismissive. She would look away. Walk away. Who can blame her; he played her more than he played me.

So, I learnt to lie about my father and for my father. Whenever I could get taunted by other kids – “you don’t have a father”-  I would lie. I would say he traveled a lot, that he was busy, that’s why he couldn’t come. I made excuses for a man who didn’t even know I was doing it. Then, one day my mum showed up with a book, a gift from him. She said, “your father sent you this book.” Inside, he had written a love note and signed it From Dad. I stared at the words intensely; from Dad. Unbelievable. He existed! I ran my finger on his words, trying to feel him, to make him alive. 

That book became my proof – I carried it around like it meant something more. Like it could fill the space he left. See? I do have a father. And he cares. He is the kind of guy who buys me books. And thus, a pattern was created. I held onto that book the way I would later hold onto men who gave me just enough attention to keep me believing, hoping. 

I reached out to him after high school. I didn’t know who he was. I had never seen him, so I had built him up in my head. I thought he was suave, and handsome, and well travelled, and well read, and fluid, and all that. I thought he walked with long strides and held tea cups with one big hand and never blew his tea before he sipped it. 

To be fair, he was, and still is all that, but he wasn’t the father that I needed. During one of our conversations I asked if he could help with fees for a language course I wanted to take. A language he spoke really well, and this was my attempt to be like him. He told me that times were tough, that he couldn’t afford it. I understood. I didn’t ask again. But then I found out that he was paying for his other children. All through college. He catered to them. And though they deserve it I wondered why he didn’t do it for me. It hurt. The hurt of a father will cut you to the bone. 

Was I not enough to get him to step up? Yet he was doing it for others who came after me, so why not me? I knew I’d made him a father when he wasn’t ready, he hadn’t been looking forward to it, and yet, here I was forcing him to be. So perhaps the answer was I’m too much. I sat with that for a long time. That I was too much. I needed to be less. To be quiet. Not to want, or demand too much. 

I never asked him. Instead, I shrugged it off. I made myself smaller. My needs non existent. I listened to his empty promises of ‘one day i’ll do this for you’. I laughed through our conversations while staring at the large ugly question that we didn’t dare address. I learned not to expect much. Not to ask for too much. Not to need too much. I told myself that maybe, if I wasn’t too much, I would be enough.

That’s how I loved too.

I got used to men who were half there, half in, half loving me. And I took what they gave me, told myself it was enough. A late reply. A blue tick. A broken promise. A moment of kindness between stretches of silence. I knew this kind of love. I recognised it. I stayed because it was familiar. I gave too much. I asked for too little.

I stared and studied other men with their women, those who opened doors, paid bills, bought presents, surprise flowers. It fascinated me that a woman would just exist and a man would dote on her, lovingly and lavishly. So I waited for my turn. I craved it. Though I didn’t know what it looked like, I waited to be chosen. I longed to hear ‘yes, it’s you that I want’. But all I heard was ‘this wasn’t the right time’. I learned to take the men and the bag of s*** that they carried. I believed it was better than having nothing. I believed that with a little bit of patience, a little bit of scrapping the parts of me so he doesn’t have to carry, a little bit of more giving of time, space, energy, he’d finally choose me. And when they left, because they always did, I blamed myself, I told myself I should have been smaller, quieter, easier to love.

Last year I met a man when I was going through a major life event. Ok, my mother died. And then my life split open. Everywhere I stepped felt like the open mouth of a monster ready to swallow me. When I went to bed I felt like I was lying in the belly of death itself, somewhere dark. The man was someone familiar to me. I knew him. He was there. He was caring. He became indispensable during my moment of loss. He came for all the funeral meetings. Stayed until the last person left, late into the night when I was scared to be alone in a world where my mom was missing. He sat with me when I was at my very worst, at my lowest moment. He brought me coffee. He forced me to eat when it felt wrong to chew in a world where my mother was not there. He knew when to hug me. My friends liked him. My relatives liked him. They said, “Is that your man?” I said, no. That’s just my friend, Mark. He wore me down with his presence, just being there. All the time. I wasn’t accustomed to that. I didn’t know I needed that. And so I started liking him. I started seeing him as a possibility when over dinners, he spoke about us. Insinuated them. About things we would and could be. What was I to do? I’m not a stone. I’m just a girl who was grieving her mother. A girl who was alone. And lonely. 

Then one day, six months later, on a small out of town trip, when I was telling him about “our plans” because I had now bought into the dreams he had been selling me and I thought we were a couple, he said it was all a misunderstanding. He said, “this isn’t what I had signed up for.” His exact words. I was about to have my dessert; a small piece of chocolate mousse. The moon was full outside. I was in a dress that I knew he liked, that any man would like. A perfect evening that quickly turned imperfect. 

I realised that I had been with someone who was never really with me. He had told me, from the beginning, that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. But I had taken the small things – the good morning texts, the occasional dining out that we had to go 50/50 because he was looking to “save and invest more for ‘our’ future,” the way he sometimes made me feel special, the sweet words of promise that I soaked up like a dried up sponge. I convinced myself they meant more. At 37, I didn’t imagine that it was possible for my heart to break like that. It was like a teenage heartbreak. Something uniquely pure in its pain and disappointment.  

The heartbreak seemed to last for the whole of 2024. I felt like I was grieving my mother and, at the same time, grieving myself. I felt like he had killed something I had built up in my heart. An idea, a dream. He had bludgeoned it. Last year was tough.  

I’m getting older now and the weight of rejection and abandonment has been getting too heavy to carry. The waiting and hoping to be someone’s chosen one. Something in me broke last year. Maybe because I had been here before. I think it was because I had spent my whole life trying to earn love from men who had already decided I wasn’t worth staying for. I’d spent my whole life asking Why not me? 

I have decided never to ask that question anymore. I have pulled back too. Not because I don’t want love, but because I’m tired. Like I said, I’m getting older now, it’s time to retire from this fight for ‘love’.

I have forgiven my father. Not because it erases the past, but because I don’t want to carry the weight of his choices anymore. He tries, in his own way, to show up now. I let him. But I no longer need him to prove anything to me. Instead, I see him as a perfectly flawed man who happened to have sired me….with that, we have so much fun together.

Last year I decided that I wasn’t waiting anymore. Not for love. I don’t have the energy. I’m not fascinated any more. I’ve seen so much ugliness and wreckage that it’s tainted me. I’m not trying to prove I’m enough either, if you can’t see it in the time we interact, then you must be looking for someone else and that’s ok. I’m learning to just sit and let things that are not for me pass me by. The other day I realised that I am someone’s someone. I’m someone’s sibling, someone’s cousin, someone’s ride or die, someone’s friend. And I’m definitely God’s daughter –  and that is enough for me.

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What madness happened to you last year? What’s your hardest thing in 2024? Email it on [email protected] You can write a synopsis. Or, if you are a budding writer like today’s person, then go at it. 

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