This story was originally published in Denise Mills' Substack, The Tiny Pleasures.
When I was ten years old, I asked my mother why she didn't divorce my father. In response, she looked at me like I just morphed into an alien. "Why do you hate your father so much?" she asked, her eyes wide. I shook my head in response and left the room, thinking to myself: Why the hell wouldn't I?
After my father suffered a workplace accident when I was two, he left his labourer job and the family survived off my mother's administration wage. The pain of his bad back became an excuse for increasingly volatile behaviour, and Mum's boundaries slowly vanished into thin air.
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In an attempt to minimise his outbursts, the family dynamics were that anything my mother, sister, brother or I needed came a distant second to my father's wants. These wants included expensive clothing, regular trips to the pub and the occasional indulgence in takeaway; his favourite was the McDonald's triple cheeseburger, which he'd order in drive-thru then pull over to eat while the rest of the family would wait empty-handed. I'd watch in disgust as he'd lick the grease from his fingers.
Dad's carefree spending habits were balanced elsewhere in the family budget; for more than a year Mum toted a plastic shopping bag in lieu of a handbag for her keys, lipstick and purse. Other signs could be seen from our home-scissored fringes, our patched up clothing, and my brother's white sneakers that my mother painted black with shoe polish each week to meet the school uniform requirements. "I didn't care about the bullies," my brother said when we reflected on this recently.
"Whatever they did to me was never as bad as what I got at home."
Most days, my father spent his time outside, leaning over the side fence and watching neighbours pass by. Mum's trips home were timed, and she received tirades of red-faced abuse if she took minutes longer than he expected. After he'd expended his energy from yelling, he'd return outside and bang on the nearest external wall of the house when he wanted another beer or a new packet of cigarettes, which Mum would deliver in hurried steps.
According to my mother, my father's dominant personality traits were "just the pain talking", and the real him was the man who occasionally tilted his head to the side and called her beautiful. He said it with an expectant look on his face that I read as, "Aren't I a lovely man? Aren't I generous for offering you a compliment?"
Unable to get along with either parent – Dad for his volatility and Mum for enabling his behaviour – I left home at not-quite-sixteen, quitting school and living in a one bedroom apartment with a shared bathroom, my expenses covered by my full time McDonalds wage.
The last time I spoke to my father was during an obligatory visit a few weeks after my mother had died. I was twenty five. Unsure of what to say to a man who rarely spoke to me during the sixteen years I lived under his roof, except to yell, I stood in silence in the front yard while he leaned over the colorbond fence and sipped his beer, ignoring my presence. "I really miss Mum," I eventually said in an attempt to connect. "How do you think I feel?" he snapped.
This was not an unusual comment for him; he'd said the same thing when I cried during her funeral preparations. But it was at this point I decided my efforts were futile, and I'd tried for long enough. To cut ties with my father I didn't need to tell him not to call me, or not to visit, because he'd never done either of those things in the nine years since I moved out of home. I just needed to stop coming around — which is exactly what I did.
People told me I'd regret it. "You only have one father," my former boss said at a Christmas party after he'd asked about my parents. I think people who provide these reactions are projecting their own experiences; they probably had an imperfect father who – at various points during their lives – had shown love or interest towards their children. I'd hold onto a parent like that, too.
In 2021, my brother called to deliver the news that Dad had died, alone in his early seventies at his aged care home. I was forty-two and hadn't spoken to him in seventeen years. My brother had cut ties a couple of years after I did, and my sister — who kept in touch, albeit infrequently — was in my father's bad books because she stopped lending giving him money. To this day I don't know what he died from, or if it was slow or sudden.
Two days prior to this news, I dreamt of his passing and was there with him. Not as an act of daughterly love, but as a human who felt empathy for another human who'd absolutely f**ked up his life. After the dream I cried for a little boy who had so much promise, who played with his siblings and probably had a kind heart, who somehow grew into an entitled man who called my mother "stupid" almost every day.
But when I got the news, I did not cry. I just thought: "What a shame to live the way he did."
None of his five living siblings could see the point of having a funeral. They, too, had received their fair share of his abuse and entitlement. He had no friends, and I'm told that people in his hometown referred to him as "the arsehole". He zoomed around on a yellow mobility scooter and intentionally ran into the shins of adults and small children who stood in his way.
To have no funeral was such a relief: no fakeness, no lies that he was a great person who will be missed. In the days before this was decided, I was losing sleep. I imagined the funeral director saying my father would be "reunited with my mother in heaven". Furious, my imaginary self jumped up to announce, "No he's f**king not. There's no way he's getting anywhere near her."
If there is another life after this, I genuinely wish him all the best for it. But just like I have "only one father", there is only one me. And cutting ties was the healthiest, most respectful thing I've done. If only my mother had done the same.
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