“Sonya, this father-daughter thing… I don’t think it’s working anymore.” My dad was breaking up with me.
Our conversations had been increasingly testy, fragile, and edgy. Well, they’d been that way between Dad and everybody. As usual, he’d found ways to cut people out of his life. After gambling away most of an inheritance with his addictive behavior, he’d been homeless for a bit, so my brother and I were helping to pay his rent to keep him housed. A neighbor in his building got a restraining order to keep him away from her. Then he threatened to break his landlord’s legs. Great. Even with financial help, he found a way to lose his housing.
To make things worse, Dad’s grip on reality was slipping further into dementia and delusion. My brother and I regularly called each other to play the game, “Is this person/situation in Dad’s life real?” The hot lady who wanted to date him really badly – likely not real. The compassionate convenience store owner who brought him a free cup of soup – likely real. And so on.
Our relationships with him could have easily become unhealthy in any number of ways: codependent, enabling, etc. My brother and I agreed that we were solving for one thing: No regrets. Give Dad the love and care that we feel good about so we have nothing to regret when he dies… or chooses to break up with us.
Dad had given this a lot of thought and gave me very clear reasons why he was breaking up with me. None of them were based in any shared reality. Once again, the “Sonya-in-my-dad’s-head” was doing things that were news to me. My husband was now included in the delusion game. “Mikey is cheating on you with another woman,” my dad informed me like he was doing me a favor. I knew this game – the game of sowing dissent between family members. He – and my grandmother on my mother’s side – were masters at it. Fortunately, of all the lies he could have picked about Mike, that one was the most absurd. I’ve never met a more monogamous man in my life.
After listening attentively to his barrage of delusional accusations, I saw clearly that he wanted an argument. He loved arguments. But I had no more arguments within me. Even the slightest attempt to correct the record would evoke a fight. I had only one thing to say.
“Ok, Dad.”
“So we’re not going to talk anymore, ok? Ok. Bye!” And he hung up.
A little stunned, I sat on the sage green couch by the window and watched the rain. It started to rain inside me. I wept and wailed, alone in the house, free to let it all out. Decades of hurt and hoping, grieving the losses that had already happened, crying with relief that I didn’t have to try so hard to be his daughter anymore.
Part of me knew this moment was really important; it was a gateway to release anything and everything that I needed to purge or surrender about my relationship with my dad. It was a gateway to freedom. I sprinted through that gateway as fast as I could, greedy for breakthrough, willing to face any and all difficult emotions and memories. I spent time with every feeling and sensation in my body. I let it be there and tell its story. I explored every memory that arose. I gave love and healing to any part of me that needed it. I can’t possibly remember everything I went through that day. It felt like an earthquake that was 7.8 on the Richter scale. It changed me permanently. Whatever happened that day felt even bigger than me, my dad, or our relationship. It was like a fierce storm of change blew through, changing everything in its path.
I knew it was the death of the relationship as it had been. There was no going back. I didn’t know for sure if he would actually ever speak to me again. But if he did, I knew it couldn’t possibly be the same.
He did try to connect in his goofy way. He signed up for my email newsletters under the fake name of Elmer Fudd. He sent weird, cryptic emails written in all caps that made no sense and accused me of one thing or another. I didn’t have it in me to take the bait. Though his emails were arriving in my inbox, they weren’t actually meant for me. They were for the Sonya-in-his-head, his mother, his brother, his father, and a barrage of other people who had hurt him on the road. I simply sent him love, imagined him surrounded in golden light, and let him go.
