If you ask my mother what my father’s like, she’ll quip, ‘He’s not a bad man, just an idiot.’ A quirky anecdote usually follows this statement. The way he’d dance wildly to pop music on ABC’s Rage. The time he started a food fight at a party. How he insisted on mowing the lawn in thongs until the day he caught a bare foot under the blades and severed his big toe.
Any concrete memories of my own come in blurred snapshots: My father showing me a card trick (it still baffles people when I do it). The way he’d make my toys speak with funny, squeaky voices. His tinkering with 80s video gaming cabinets. But playful moments with me were rare. Mostly, I remember him asleep on the couch—even when he was supposed to be looking after me.
My mother, a sheltered Italian Catholic girl, married young. Nineteen. My father, late twenties. The few dates they had were chaperoned by my hot-headed and feisty nonna, who soon told my mother to leave him. The baptism-by-fire matrimony had my mother learn a harsh lesson—she had chosen the wrong man. A man who had good intentions but never seemed to follow through—with anything. Too ashamed to pull the ripcord, she tried to make it work for nearly two decades.
The last childhood memory I have of my father reaches back to the early nineties. I was ten. My parents had divorced two years prior, and he had come home from an extended stay in his homeland of Lebanon. One morning, he appeared at my school, almost as if he’d materialised out of thin air, to show me a photo of him with a pregnant woman.
The baptism-by-fire matrimony had my mother learn a harsh lesson—she had chosen the wrong man.
‘Her name is Zahra,’ my father beamed. He then pulled out their wedding portrait. In this image, her waist was thinner. She wore a pearl-covered ivory gown with her thick black hair piled high upon her head. Her smile didn’t quite reach her heavily made-up eyes. I remember thinking she reminded me of a wicked witch disguised as a princess. My father, wearing a pale blue suit, his wiry hair slicked back, certainly didn’t embody a prince.
My brain didn’t quite comprehend the situation. ‘When can I visit?’
‘She’s due in three months,’ he responded, not answering the question. ‘I’m a family man.’
With innocent logic, I tried to reason with him: ‘We’re family.’
My father sighed, equal parts patronising and pitying. ‘You,’ he pointed between my eyes. ‘Your mum. That’s the past.’ He ruffled my unkempt hair, the curls identical to his own. I gave him a buck-toothed grimace, and he squeezed my little sausage fingers. His last goodbye to me, with my arms wrapped around his legs, was: ‘All the best.’ I didn’t grasp the finality of that moment until much later.
I recounted the event to my mother who had but one word: ‘Idiot.’ She insisted I didn’t need my father. So, that’s what I kept telling myself.
The mantra became so deeply embedded that I only recently asked my mother, ‘Why didn’t you hold my father to his responsibilities?’
Her expression became a mix of anger, sadness, determination and remorse. After a beat, she said, ‘I couldn’t let him keep disappointing you.’
She was right, of course. But the damage had already been done.
Growing up in the 90s meant I was raised by cheesy American sitcoms with nuclear families and a side of moralistic didacticism. In an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air entitled ‘Papa’s Got a Brand-New Excuse’, Will Smith refers to his absent father with an emotive rhetorical question: ‘How come he don’t want me?’ In response, there is a clichéd yet heartfelt embrace with Uncle Phil. The life lesson should’ve been: Just like me, Will had people who loved him. He didn’t need his father. Except, he did. And so did I.
Apparently, Smith’s tears in that scene are authentic, evoked by his real-life experience of paternal abandonment. Watching that episode at twelve years old, I asked myself that same question for the first time (but not the last).
His last goodbye to me, with my arms wrapped around his legs, was: ‘All the best.’
When I reflect on my fatherless upbringing, there is an unsettling sense of normality. I simply did not know any different. Fathers were fleeting figures who might be around, if they felt like it. Mine didn’t. The good father seemed like a mythological creature. Some fantastical hero who, in made-up stories, was present, protective and powerful. For me, normal meant living in a Western Sydney box of a house with my mother and nonna, two headstrong women who fiercely protected and nurtured me. However, my grandmother’s recurring breast cancer made our lives a struggle. Mum became her full-time carer. I became financially independent in my teens and contributed to running the household as an adult.
My father avoided child support by working for cash, the justification being the money he made was for his family. On my eighteenth birthday, I received a letter courtesy of Centrelink. It documented his correct (incredibly lucrative) earnings while stating that now that I was a legal adult, he no longer had a financial obligation to provide for me.
My mother rolled her eyes when I showed her. ‘He does remember it’s your birthday, that idiot.’ What a gift.
With my mother’s ‘we-don’t-need-him’ attitude, we simply carried on like we always had. It never occurred to me in my carefree teens or bumbling twenties, but my father’s lack of support created challenges I had not signed up for. At fourteen years old, my first job paid $3-something an hour to fund school supplies, uniforms, transportation, excursions, and to splurge on the occasional ‘Tight Ass Tuesday’ cinema ticket. During my TAFE course, I held two retail jobs. While studying at university, I had three. To succeed in life (or more realistically, to keep my head above water), I felt like a one-woman show in a twenty-ball juggling act, riding on a unicycle with a flat tyre—and the balls were on fire.
Crossing the threshold of maturity in my thirties evoked tidal waves of resentment. I began to understand that my life would have been completely different if my father had been…well, a father. I felt cheated. Worst of all, I still felt discarded.
Miraculously, I’d managed to escape some serious items on the ‘daddy issues’ checklist. I had faith in relationships—and in men. As unlikely as it may seem, I found fulfilment in a loving marriage. Perhaps my father had taught me something valuable after all…how to recognise what I didn’t want in a relationship.
Then, almost thirty years after he disappeared from my life, my cousin called me. My father had been in an accident and ‘it wasn’t looking good’.
When I try to characterise my emotional state at that moment, ‘squashed flat like an aluminium can under someone’s boot’ isn’t bad, but with my hardened, pragmatic approach to emotions, the image is too melodramatic. Psychological jargon like ‘depersonalised’ could work but doesn’t capture the freefall despair. I do remember thinking, Why should I care? My automatic response was, ‘I don’t exist to him.’
There was a silence while my cousin searched for the right words. ‘I just thought you’d want to know. I’ll text you the hospital details. I’m here for you.’ We hung up.
Until that moment, thoughts of my father only resurfaced in fleeting bouts: When an instructor taught me how to drive, when he didn’t walk me down the aisle, when I graduated university. Now I kept thinking, How could you forget your first-born daughter? Why didn’t you want me? I knew that eventually my father’s time would be up, but living it dismantled a psychological floodgate I’d constructed for years.
Perhaps my father had taught me something valuable after all.
I’m not sure what made me visit him. As I arrived at the hospital alone, I couldn’t help but think that if our places were reversed, my father wouldn’t have come to see me.
The nurses informed me that my father had literally been hit by a truck. A six-tonner, which rolled over his chest while he was working underneath it. Brakes failed. Freak accident. He had broken ribs, a punctured lung and internal bleeding. He could only communicate by writing on a clipboard.
When I saw him, I hid my shock behind stoic stoniness. The vibrant, messy-haired man frozen in my memories was now replaced by a white and wispy frail figure. He had tyre tracks imprinted on his upper chest. Cords dangled and monitors beeped to the tune of his fluttering heart.
Before I could process what I was seeing, his eyelids opened. I assumed he wouldn’t recognise me. The pudgy, frizzy-haired kid with thick eyebrows and protruding front teeth had smoothed out with age.
My father’s bloodshot eyes bulged. He gagged on the plastic tube shoved down his oesophagus. His vitals became crazed. A reaction reserved for seeing ghosts.
Medical staff pushed me aside, assuming he was crashing. I hurriedly explained the situation, met by uncomfortable glances shifting between myself and my father. Once he had calmed down, they let us be.
His shaking hands reached for the clipboard. He began scrawling in crude capitals. Zahra not let me see you. Nothing I could do.
In a way, this moment represented what I’d always gotten from him—nothing. But somehow, it felt worse than nothing. Looking back, I think I had hoped he would acknowledge his past mistakes, take some responsibility.
All I could muster were a few words, generic, fit for a get-well card: ‘Wishing you strength with each day. May good health come to you.’
As I pulled away from the bedside, his callused hand grabbed mine. I bid him farewell. He wrote down some final words. I love you.
Later in the year, an unknown number called my phone. I didn’t recognise my father’s voice immediately. It sounded gravelly, weathered from injury and age. He was on his way to a full recovery. The doctors had labelled him a ‘miracle’ What struck me about this conversation was how he spoke to me as though everything between us was fine. Perhaps, for him, it was. He insisted we see each other.
He wrote down some final words. I love you.
We met for coffee in a small cafe. I didn’t feel ready. My bitterness still bubbled. We sat down with our drinks on opposite sides of the table. I stared at him, still getting used to how much he’d changed. The young man remained vivid in my mind. The gap a constant reminder of all the time we’d lost.
He broke the silence. ‘From now on, we will do this more often, habibi.’ His tone indicated I should be impressed. He raised his cup in a toast.
Something inside my head ruptured. An emotional aneurysm. ‘Just because you have decided you’re ready to acknowledge my existence, I’m supposed to be grateful?’ A few heads turned.
My father’s face dropped. ‘If you’re just going to bring up the past and be upset, maybe I shouldn’t see you.’
The burning in my cheeks triggered a lump in my throat. I swallowed it down. ‘Why are you a devoted father to your other children? Why didn’t you want me in your life?’
My father rubbed his grey chin stubble. ‘I was shackled.’
Weariness washed over me. ‘You’re seeing me now, though. Why?’
‘We are older. Life is shorter.’
A snort of pained laughter escaped my throat. I stood up and uttered the words he’d told me all those years ago. ‘All the best.’
My father stopped me with a gentle hand. ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you.’ His jaw trembled. ‘I want to at least try, while we still have time. Please, stay.’
I immediately thought about all the missed moments of family connection. No birthdays. No Easter celebrations. No Christmas dinners or presents under the tree. A blank slate of nothingness lay where memories should be. That’s what he’d chosen for us.
My heart filled with anger then emptiness. I had a longing to stay and to go. If nothing else, I had something I never thought I would get. Acknowledgement. I owed him nothing. But I owed myself.
My entire life, I had waited for him to decide if I deserved to be in his life. Now, I needed to seize back my agency. It was me who needed to determine if my father deserved to have me in his life. I sat back down.
The fables my mother had told me over the years flipped through my mind, like pages in an unfinished photo album. Her voice floated through my mind: He’s not a bad man. It was time to find out.
‘Tell me,’ I began, ‘about the time you caught your toe in the lawnmower.’
My father smiled. In his expression, I saw glimmers of regret and fear and desperation and sorrow and perhaps…love.
His apology certainly wasn’t enough. But it was a start.
