Generic Daddy Issues

Yesterday, I bought a new book called Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington, and it’s kind of tearing me up inside.

It’s about a girl, whose father is deployed to Iraq for a year, leaving her to look after her little sister and devastated mother, and then they find out that he’s gone MIA. It’s already made me cry three times, and I’m only 100 pages in, but it’s not the initial plot of the book that’s getting to me.

This girl - fictional, I know, but there’s billions upon billions of girls in reality with the same advantage - has the relationship with her father that I would sell my soul in a second to have had with my dad. She’s been wearing her father’s old shirt for three weeks straight, and I do that sometimes with one of my dad’s old t-shirts - probably the only thing he owns in this house. I know that if my dad had of stayed, he would of been a good dad. He’s the reason I eat how I eat, why I do what I do, why I act how I act and why I love what I love. He’s always pushed me to be my best, but only ever from afar. Sometimes I won’t see him for weeks or over a month, and sometimes he’ll never call.

I was always such a daddy’s girl, before he left. I remember, when he and my mother were having problems, there were nights where he never came home. At this point, my parents were sleeping in separate rooms, and I’d go into his room and lie down in his bed and watch TV on his little TV. I remember whenever we went anywhere, I’d always want to be with him. It’s still the same - whenever we go anywhere as a family group (usually only big events involving either myself or my brother) I’ll always follow him around like a puppy, sit beside him at the dinner table, eat what he encourages me to eat, or what he eats.

I wish more than anything that he’d of stayed. Things would be so, so different if he’d of stayed.
I’d be different.

My brother and I wouldn’t have always felt so left out and weird, being from single parent families, and our family wouldn’t have been so ridiculed by our neighbors for being a single-parent family. Not only that, but we’d have never of moved to Arklow. We’d still be living in Dublin, in Portmarnock, or maybe we’d have eventually moved out to Santry, because that’s where I went to playschool and where Angela, Letty and Ann all live.

Things would be so different, and I really wish that he never left.