Dear Carolyn: My son and I are close, but my brilliant daughter has largely shut me out. She is 30 but, I believe, still nursing resentment over my divorce from her mother when she was 4. We were very close when I had to move out. I also made some very bad choices in those early years after my divorce when my drinking became a problem. Both my daughter and her younger brother have grounds to be angry about my behavior during that time.
Yes, I made mistakes, but I also paid the consequences and turned myself around. I quit drinking 25 years ago and have always been an engaged, supportive and loving parent. Both my parents were AWOL when I was young, as their parents had been, and I was determined to break that chain. And I did.
My daughter has been casually hurtful in the past in ways that seemed deliberate, and I think she may be doing so again. Two of her short stories were recently published in a prestigious literary magazine. She emailed me the stories a few days ago.
Using a pen name, she falsely depicts me as an indifferent, uncaring, completely absent father. I’m not a character in the story, but my absence is a major element. It’s brilliantly done, but it leaves a false impression of me as a deadbeat, and it’s completely unfair.
I’m thrilled and immensely proud of my daughter for getting published (and have told her so), but I’m deeply hurt. I hate to make it all about me, but did she depict me as a disengaged dad intending to be hurtful? What other conclusion is there?
Asking my daughter not to take creative liberties when writing about me is just part of my problem. My bigger problem is how to process my anger in a way that keeps the door open to a healthier relationship down the road. I really don’t know how to talk to my daughter about this.
— Feeling Shafted
Feeling Shafted: Short answer: You don’t. You don’t tell her what to write.
You also don’t assume she’s writing about you. And you don’t assume how she feels about what she writes, or what she intends you to feel.
If you hate to make it all about you, then don’t make it all about you.
You may reasonably infer she is writing about you, and you may understandably feel hurt. That’s not only fine, that’s human.
What you don’t get to do — and still lay claim to being “supportive” — is expect her to fix your feelings for you.
You’re the one who deals with those. Alone or with help, that’s up to you. But you keep the two emotional paths separate: She is on hers, and her art is part of that, 100 percent her business and her prerogative. (This includes her right to be wrong.) You are on yours, and your redemption is part of that. That’s it.
Your praise for her work is the best case you can make.
Speaking of your redemption, the math is funky. If she’s 30 now and was 4 when you divorced her mom, then you miscounted the “years” of either drinking or sobriety.
