This is a serious question, mostly addressed to the adult women among us but also to anyone else who has a stake in the matter.
What did your father do for you/not do for you, that you needed?
Context: I have recently become a father to a daughter, with a mother whose father was not around when she was growing up. I won’t bore you all with the details but our daughter is here now and I am realising that I’m the only one in our little family who has really had a father before. But I have never been a girl. And I know that as a boy, my relationships with my mother and father were massively influential and powerful but at the same time radically different to each other. People say that daughters and fathers have a unique relationship too.
Question: What was your father to you? What matters the most when it comes to a father making his daughter loved, safe, confident and free? To live a good life as an adult?
I’d like this to be a mature, personal and real discussion about daughters and fathers, rather than a political thing, so I humbly ask to please speak from the heart and not the head on this one :)
Thank you
P.S Apologies if this question is badly written or conceived; I haven’t been getting enough sleep! It is what it is!
My dad was quick to judge things and people that were different than him, and that included not liking or accepting LGBT+ people. He would also regularly and half-jokingly threaten my siblings and me with violence if we did something he didn’t like; his favorite saying was “i’ll put your head through the wall”.
Needless to say that once I discovered my queerness, I knew I could never trust my father or tell him. He had conditioned me to be afraid of him. I came out to him at 19 and was kicked out of the house and he’s never spoken to me since. He also kicked out my older sister for dating a guy my dad didn’t approve of, but at least he still spoke to her after that.
Please don’t do things that would make your kids afraid of you. It messes kids up in a big way when they can’t trust their caregivers.