Terri White, 36, grew up with an absent and unreliable father, the legacy of which has impacted her own relationships. But it's also made her the woman she is today.
Long before I knew what I wanted to be, I knew who I wanted to be. It was quite simple, really. Or I thought it was then. It was a dream that I tangled my fingers around and tried to make firm in my fists. I wanted to be a daddy’s girl. I probably always knew that’s who I wanted to be, but it didn’t begin to truly bloom in my brain until I was eight or nine years old: the age at which you begin to notice how your life and those of people around you don’t quite line up.
Through the smudged lenses of my jam-jar glasses, I would hungrily watch my friends with their fathers, hypnotised by their casual interactions. The light way they laughed, how their fingers entwined easily, the gentle care of a jacket being zipped all the way up. It always amazed me to see them waiting nervously as we clambered off the bus from a school trip or poking their heads gingerly around the door as Brownies wrapped up. It all served to make me ask: I had a dad out there, so why wasn’t I good enough to be his girl?
Almost three decades later, it’s a question I still don’t have the answer to, and likely never will. But new questions have been introduced alongside it. If it’s said that we’re formed by our fathers – the good and the bad– what becomes of those of us who have no father to be formed by? Or a terrible father who can potentially deform us? My fear: it leaves us to go through life with gaps and holes that we struggle to pack and fill.
My relationship with my dad never really began – my mum and I escaped from him when I was just two. The following years were a series of false starts and disappointments. He saw us occasionally before quickly starting his second family. He lived six miles away, but we’d go years without seeing him, his contention- unbelievably, as the parent– was we knew where he was if we wanted to see him. We did and, as I got older, I didn’t, my dreams of being his girl long evaporated.
When I was 17, and navigating my first relationship without a map, I changed my mind, keen to prod the questions a little. Hopes of a restorative process leading to a real father-daughter relationship proved optimistic and after a series of fresh rejections, I drew a line under our relationship and resigned myself to not having a father. Hey, you couldn’t miss what you never had, right? And when I looked into his eyes– the exact shade of blue as mine– I felt, well, nothing.
But that didn’t stop me worrying about the consequences: whether his absence and rejections had changed me or shaped me into somebody I wasn’t ever meant to be, but now was, inextricably. I can’t be alone in this: in 2013, The Centre for Social Justice reported that a million children in the UK were growing up without a father. A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review the year before said a distant father could damage a child’s life for decades to come. Every time one of these stories flashed up (the latter was headlined, ‘How absence of a loving father can wreck a child’s life’), I’ve felt my chest tighten as I’ve assessed my life for conclusions. Was every wrong turn and failure– a volatile temper in my late teens, a broken engagement at 21– down to this? Was my path littered with bombs from the beginning, with more lying ahead?
The signs aren’t good. I’m 36 years old, single and have had a handful of relationships that have, obviously, failed. Looking back over notable entanglements with something approaching a clear eye, it’s apparent that I have a type: a man who makes me work hard for his affection, withholds it and is eternally emotionally unavailable. The first time I ever made the connection between my partners and my dad was the night I sat in my flat waiting for my boyfriend, who simply
never showed up (not the first time it happened, but this was notable).
As I watched the hands of the clock moving more and more slowly, a memory unfurled. I was waiting for my dad to come and take me to see Santa in the Co-op after an out-of-the-blue request to visit. The hours passed and I continued to sit, even when it was clear he wasn’t coming. I refused to believe he wouldn’t come, even though he never did. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to track the source of this yearning for love that’s never given. Or how you can mistake the pain of rejection for the bittersweet pain of love. Sometimes I worry my brain thinks they’re one and the same thing.
The truth is, I have no model of how to behave with men, or an image of what a healthy, functioning relationship looks like. I’m not surprised that some of my closest friends are wonderful couples with the most loving relationships: I look at them and learn, and see what it could be like.
Would I still be single in my late thirties had I had a relationship with my dad? I don’t know. I certainly don’t need men – and never have – and I think this is difficult for most men (or people, actually) to feel from a partner. I am, however, immensely relieved that I do ultimately want a guy. That’s not all I have to thank him for.
From bombing around our estate on my BMX to travelling to Mexico for a onewoman holiday last month, I have a fierce independence that I wouldn’t sacrifice for anything or anyone. I’ve always been completely financially independent: the product, I believe, of there being no one I could put in a panicked midnight phone call to when my bank account went into the red. I’m all plan As, there is no plan B.
I also have to thank him – and specifically the economic realities of living in a one-parent family on benefits– for giving me a drive and determination that still propels me in everything I do. It’s why I wanted to go to university, why I wanted to move to London and why I wanted to be an editor. I think, on some level, I want to be a success to prove to him that I am worth something, that I could have been good enough had he given me a chance.
But the greatest legacy of my absent father is probably this: I love hard, with loyalty and fire, and work hard to treasure the people in my life and ensure they know what they mean to me. He made me want to be the best sister, daughter, auntie and friend possible. The smudges on my glasses have been wiped clean and that is now who I want to be.
Terri is editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and has contributed to My Old Man