I Am Not My Mother's Keeper

I called my dad on Father’s Day. We talked for at least an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. And it’s funny, isn’t it? For someone I was never really allowed to know growing up, talking to him feels easier now than it ever has.

It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when every conversation felt stiff around the edges. Awkward. Careful. Like we were both trying to read from a script nobody gave us.

Because how do you just step back into a father-daughter relationship with someone you barely know? How do you pretend closeness with someone you were ripped away from right when that bond was supposed to be growing roots?

I was angry at him for years. Not because he left me. I knew that part wasn’t his fault. But I expected him to know how to be the father I needed anyway. I expected him to somehow show up as the daddy he was supposed to be after my egg donor ripped me away from him.

I thought because I made the choice, as an adult, to move across the country and try to know him, he should automatically know what to do with me. Like love comes with instructions. Like grief hands you a map.

How unfair of me, right?

Neither one of us knew how to navigate those waters. He knew little me, not the abused, guarded, broken woman she helped shape. He knew who I was before the abuse hardened certain parts of me. Before he lost his say in my life. Before things went sideways.

It’s wild how vivid my memories are from the first three or four years of my life. How clearly I remember him. And how little I remember her.

I used to think it was because he was around more. Now I wonder if there are things my body remembers that my mind refuses to hand back to me. Maybe it was trauma. Maybe it was distance. Maybe it was both.

Maybe I’ll never know.

I remember going to his house one year for my birthday as an adult. By then, I had been living in the same state as him for a few years. Looking back, I can see that he was trying to be a dad in the only way he knew how.

He took my kids to do fun things. He had us over for holidays. He bought nice gifts. He did the tangible things. The things he missed out on for all those years. The things she had the chance to do and took for granted.

But what I really wanted was harder to wrap. I wanted someone I could talk to. I wanted to be a daddy’s girl. I wanted the kind of dad I could call just to tell him about my day, good or bad. The kind who would text to ask how the job interview went. The kind I could send a picture to and ask, “Which dress should I wear to my friend’s wedding?”

That night, after dinner, we were settling in for cake and a drink or two. I was trying, badly, to explain what I needed from him. I didn’t have the words. Little me was never allowed to have them.

And then he said something I never forgot.

“I just don’t understand what you want from me.”

“I want you to be a dad.”

I kept saying it over and over, like repeating it would make it make sense. Like if I said it enough times, he would suddenly understand the ache underneath it.

But I didn’t know how to explain it. I cried. I raised my voice. I fell apart in a room where he was probably already feeling helpless. My boyfriend at the time led me out the door. My dad’s wife packed up my birthday cake and sent it with us.

I stayed angry about that night for years.

Now I get it.

How was he supposed to know what being a dad meant to me if I couldn’t explain it? He didn’t know me any better than I knew him. The fault didn’t belong to either of us. I felt like because he was the father, the responsibility to know everything rested on him.

But we were both adults by then. Both wounded in different ways by the same severed thing. Neither of us asked to be torn apart when I was four. Neither of us knew how to rebuild what had been stolen.

I felt like I tried. I’m sure he did too. Maybe we were both trying, just in different languages.

I can see that now. I tend to show love through acts of service and time. I want presence. I want consistency. I want someone to show up, not just when it is convenient, but when it matters.

I think he shows love through money and gifts. My mother always told me he was trying to buy my love, like that was some terrible flaw she needed me to hate in him. And maybe, in a way, she was partially right.

But he wasn’t trying to buy my love. He was trying to show me he loved me in the only way he knew how. In the only way distance allowed. In the only way left to him after she made sure everything else was harder.

So when we spoke on Father’s Day, I gave him grace.

Not the fake kind. Not the kind where I pretend nothing hurt. Real grace. The kind that says, “I see the damage, but I also see the trying.”

I let the conversation be what it was. We reminisced about when I was little. He said he was sorry for not being there. He said he tried.

And I told him there was nothing to apologize for.

Because for once, I could see what he did do instead of only grieving what he couldn’t.

When I mentioned how my mother treated me growing up, and how she still treats me now, he didn’t do what she always does. He didn’t slide in with covert insults. He didn’t sharpen his words until they could pass for concern.

He just said, “Wow, she still hasn’t grown up?”

And I heard sadness in his voice. Not disdain. Not venom. Not that familiar bitterness she wraps in a bow and calls truth.

Just sadness.

And sometimes that tells you everything you need to know about a person’s character.

I used to feel like I had to protect her.

Because she trained me to.

She conditioned me to become who she needed me to be, not who I actually was. If anyone said anything that even brushed against the truth of her, I jumped in front of it. I defended her. I explained her. I softened the edges of what she did so other people wouldn’t see the whole ugly shape of it.

She taught me to be her keeper.

But where was she when I needed keeping?

Where was she when I needed a mother instead of a wound? Why did she take me from everyone else who loved me, only to walk away when I needed her most and leave me to raise myself from the wreckage?

I am no longer my mother’s keeper.

Because she was never mine.

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H.L. Browning

Writer • Healing Advocate

Rewriting the stories I once survived