Daddy's Girl

“I thought that by shutting you out, by no longer being there for you, it would force you into a better bond with your mother.”

Until I was about nine or ten, I was a daddy’s girl. I felt closer to him than to Mom. She and I were always clashing—there was always something that failed her approval. I read too long on the couch. I didn’t dress the way she liked. Nothing seemed to ever be quite right.

Dad was different. He’d talk to me about his work, or other grown-up things. That attention made me feel older, useful, good about myself. Maybe I liked it because he seemed sad a lot of the time. Misunderstood, maybe, is the better word. He used to tell me I understood him better than Mom did. That I was smarter than her.

(Except when it came to helping me with my math homework. That was a disaster. The formulas made perfect sense to him, while to me they meant absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. I asked too many questions, and he didn’t like questions. For him it just was, the way it was. Period. Me and math—not a good match.)

Mom used to send me to him when he was feeling sad. “Go be with your father. He always feels better when you’re around,” she’d say. And I always did.

Then everything shifted. Dad’s work took him to Hoogkerk, a small town just north of the city of Groningen—more than two-and-a-half hours away from our house in Alphen aan den Rijn. It was a beautiful 1903 Victorian house on the Stationsstraat, the one my parents had restored together. Tall, three stories, with a stunning red and white brick exterior. The house, and the prestigious street it was on, meant too much to them. Both my parents came from humble beginnings, and prestige mattered. So, I understood, at least a little.

The other thing was that street—its own little world, with many young families who all got along well. Adults hosted late-night—sometimes all-night—parties that often spilled into the street, especially on New Year’s Eve. Us kids played curb ball before and after dinner, hide-and-seek until dark, even daring each other to ding-dong-ditch the one neighbor we thought was a scary old man. And I had a secret crush on the boy across the street, the one who played drums in his bedroom. From my window on the third floor, I could hear him practicing to Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight.

It all mattered so much they chose not to move.

So Dad left on Monday mornings, sometimes even Sunday evenings, and came back only on Friday nights. That left me with Mom for the week. I remember feeling lost. Betrayed, even. He left—not just physically (that I could understand), but emotionally too. Without explaining. Without saying why.

The only explanation I ever got came years later, when I confronted him:

“I thought that by shutting you out, by no longer being there for you, it would force you into a better bond with your mother.”

I visited him a few times during school holidays, but other than that, Dad was simply not there during the week. It took a toll on their marriage, too. I remember one night, during dinner. They screamed at each other, right in front of me and my sister. Mom ran off to the washroom in the hallway—crying.

In that washroom, magazines hung from a small hook by the round sink. Dad had punched holes in the corners so they could be strung on twine. They were filled with half-naked women.

Looking back now, what I feel most from those years is absence. Emotional absence. Not just from Dad—but from Mom, too. And the emotional confusion—the weight—of being placed in a position that was never mine to be in. It was not, and never should have been, my role to solve (or smooth over) Dad’s unhealed trauma or any of his issues, for that matter. That burden only deepened the disconnect and lingering sense of failure I carried within me.

---

This was Part I of a two-fold story about how the emotional absence from both my dad and my mom—shaped by their own unhealed trauma—left its mark on my sense of self.

Part II will be published on September 16, 2025.