There are parts of my childhood I can only understand backwards. At fifteen, understanding wasn’t available to me. Only rebellion. I had lived lines like, “I was 13 when I chose death over my father.” I meant it. Everywhere I turned, people insisted that honouring my father and mother was the secret to a long life. I believed the implication of that scripture. But my early dealings with fear, punishment, and consequences pushed me toward a different logic: if honour was the price of longevity, then maybe a short, impactful life was its own form of resistance.
At that age, anger was a type of intelligence. It was the only tool I had to interpret a world where authority felt unsafe, where existence and childhood tendencies were the crime. The anger was fuel for educational and career progress. Failure was not an option. I almost jumped from a storey building because I was afraid to explain to my father why I came fourth. (I wonder what grades he had in school.)Â I still have a stormy relationship with failure. Highly critical of myself, I can be very unforgiving of my own mistakes.
The metaphors in Is Dad God? were not exaggerations. They were intentional choices, the closest approximation to a pictorial representation of my grief and pain. When I first posted that poem on Facebook, hordes came for me, but my anger and pain and grief gave me enough stamina to wade them off. I had a counterpoint for every point raised. Some threatened death again, but I had lost that fear.
By twenty-nine, I was in therapy dealing with all the ways my coping mechanisms were ruining my relationships and general outlook on life. I could see my own perversions, my own coloured glasses, and how even my preferences and values were not all that I had thought they were. I had lived long enough to recognise patterns, to trace wounds, to see how we become the thing we fear. Dear Father revealed a literacy that had occurred. I could admit that harm often, even if unintentionally, comes from people who were themselves unequipped for tenderness.
I could say, “I forgive you, not because you deserve it, but because I have been forgiven worse.”
This brought together the demands of Christian brotherly love and the mercy I had received for my own tendencies. It would seem that everyone who said I would understand the nuances of the human condition as I grew older was right. Still, I was angry and still a little biased. At fifteen, I had demanded that “he changes his ways soon” or forfeit any chance of having a relationship with me. By twenty-nine, I strongly believed the ship had sailed.
Now, at thirty-one, adulthood offers further clarification without necessarily healing. Carrying my own responsibilities has forced me to confront my own flaws. I have seen many places where I have been unable to measure up. The pressures that break fathers do not announce themselves in advance. They arrive disguised as fatigue, frustration, missed opportunities and the slow erosion of patience. Given the different circles of generations that we have, these things should not take us by surprise. Where is the communal support when you need it? Realising these things did not excuse what I experienced, but it helped me understand and rationalise the turbulence he was walking through.
That understanding has not brought us closer. If anything, it has maintained the distance, and it allows kindness and charity to flow out of me more easily. Some relationships do not improve with clarity. They simply raise a white flag and become more honest.
I now believe a person’s best effort can still fall short, and that moral responsibility does not disappear because circumstances were difficult. Both things can be true. He tried in his own way. It was not enough. Those two sentences can live side by side without contradiction.
I do not write this out of resentment. I write it from the kind of realism adulthood forces on you, the recognition that some wounds do not close neatly and not every story ends with reconciliation. I am learning that distance can sometimes be the ethical choice, the boundary that prevents history from repeating itself.
So where am I now?
Somewhere between the boy who wanted to run, the man who wanted to analyse, and the adult who now accepts that some ties can remain unbroken, uninhabited but beautiful in their own kind of way, and still serve an ethical purpose.
I no longer expect closeness.
 I no longer expect repair.
What I expect, from myself, is not to repeat the harm I inherited.
And perhaps that is the most honest form of honour I can offer.
- Â Not rewriting the past.
- Â Not pretending it did not shape me.
- Â But refusing to let it shape whoever comes after me.
And maybe somewhere in the future is another father poem.