Looking for Daddy
On losing my father to the wild web of the human psyche and becoming fully known.
When I think of the first soil I was molded in, I think of Genesis 2:22-23:
“Then God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”
I grew from the rib of my father. The bone of his bone. The flesh of his flesh. The vision of his eye. The longing of his heart.
I am a wave of his ocean…
In ways, we are all reflections of our parental ocean. Our first ocean. Like tidal waves, our first ocean will keep pulling us back in. There’s a resonance in our cellular structure. An intelligence that keeps us longing for what we first called home. Coherency. Union. To belong. Above all: to belong.
Point break is a force of change. It’s the clash of waves. The electrical currency of point break is the creative yearning of a wave wanting to change. To break free. It’s unconscious. It’s an act of natural law. We, too, will experience the clash of waves. Before a wave hits, there is suspense - emptiness even. A friction of what has been, and what will be. Change.
Our first ocean is the first mirror to bear witness to our existence. No matter how wild, how chaotic; the first ocean will always reflect to us a mirage of home. If we want change, we must carve out a space from within our bodies. An empty space that we can fill up with pools of water and in time we will learn to call this ocean our home.
A force greater than the first ocean must be present for change to happen.
“Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is an act of will -- We do not have to love. We choose to love.” ― M. Scott Peck.
I always knew that my upbringing was unusual. My molding: different. My parents divorced when I was 4. In the 3rd grade I wrote an essay on the bubble of innocence bursting upon me. The divorce hit me like a tidal wave. It swallowed up everything that I knew to be true about life. It left very little familiarity behind. Like broken glass washed up on shore, I scrambled to bring together the few pieces I was left with to make myself a new mirror. Something that would reflect my existence.
But that wasn’t the unusual part.
In 2001, my father began painting everything orange.
Doors.
Walls.
Cabinets.
He started wearing flowers in his fedora. He grew taller. Louder. Wilder. He parked the grey SAAB with yellow headlights outside local bars in our coastal town: where he would flaunt the floral fedora. He needed an audience for his sudden surges of inspiration and rejuvenation. Whilst he kept the bar entertained, he thought I was asleep in the car. I was awake and alone. The backseat was my watchtower. I watched people, cars and lights passing by, like spirits in the streets. I kept looking for daddy. Waiting for him to come back to me.
In 2001, I lost my father to the wild web of the human psyche. Somewhere, he let go of my hand and followed the darkness into a void and never came back. Because I was of his rib, I thought that I had been lost too. I kept looking for daddy in his emerald eyes, but he was nowhere to be found. I kept calling out his name, but only his ghost answered.
I cried to my mother, “He’s not the real dad.”
His ghost put me to bed at night; woke me up in the morning; humiliated me in school; yelled at me on the phone, and left me alone in houses; in cars, and in the world altogether.
I don’t remember much. The dozen dossiers are the diaries of my childhood. Sometimes, I still wonder if it was really all that bad because I remember the beauty too. I remember my father teaching me to ask flowers for permission before picking them. Every morning, I would run to the garden and speak to the flowers and thank them, before bringing in a bouquet of wildflowers for daddy.
I remember my father telling me to turn my little ear to the wind, so I could hear how it whispered my name if I listened carefully. I remember how we almost drowned in the wild Norwegian river, because I wanted to take the sled down the forest hill. And I remember how a tiny fir saved us by the second. I remember my father telling me to pay attention to life because there was something much deeper, much truer, than what meets the eye.
These are the places where I continue to look for daddy: in the unseen, in the unheard, in the unknown. In the fields of flowers, in the wind, and in the wild river. Somewhere in those intangible places, I believe his soul wanders around restlessly. At least, these are the places within me where he continues to live.
Navigating the landscape of a bipolar parent revealed to me the multidimensional layers of life. Navigation is key. You cannot flow along in an ocean like this, because you will drown. Navigation becomes survival.
Growing up as my father’s daughter, I learnt that sometimes the reality is that you leave for school thinking that you know what life is. You glance back at your father, who’s waving goodbye from the kitchen window while smoking a cigarette. As he always does. In a quiet voice, you whisper, “See you soon, dad.” As you always do. Two weeks later, there is no ‘you’, there is no ‘see’ or no ‘soon’. There is no dad. There is a ghost, and the ghost is on his way to Tunisia, to Sidi Bou Said: The Blue City.
“When are you coming back?”
“Never maybe? When you stop causing trouble.”
I am no longer a reason to stay.
I am the reason to leave.
And now everything is orange.
What makes the human mind so beautiful, is also what makes it so fragile. Sensitivity becomes fragility if we can’t tell fragments apart from prisms, and rainbows apart from a sheltering sky.
In 2001, I tell my mom:
My bruises are invisible
The pain is invisible
I wish he would hit me so they could see how bad it hurts
There is nothing so tragically captivating as to be loved by someone who is so tenderly sensitive, yet so grippingly mad. I must watch the addictive nostalgia with the attention of a wild animal who targets her prey. No matter how mad the ocean we are born into is; it is the all-consuming reflection we long for. It is the invisible current trying to move us closer to the places we recognise as home. Even if there is no love, no embrace, no safety, no home.
My ocean wrestled me,
pressured me,
polished me,
until I became what I am today.
A goddamn diamond.
To carve out a new ocean within. To build myself a new rib of a bone, not rooted in madness, I believe is the best testimony I know to the power of human evolution and healing.
I am naturally trained in conversing with anyone who asks for my attention. I am trained to believe that I owe anyone who asks for it: my attention. I spent the weekends with my father and his technicolor crew of jazz musicians, artists, authors, actresses, writers, lumberjacks and the local fishermen of the little coastal town we lived in. I was always an only child. One year, my then 50-something-father dated a 20-year-old. Her hair was long and blonde. Her breasts were full. She didn’t feel like home, but she was gentle and kind to me.
As the only child in the loudest room, I was doomed to silence. I still go quiet in a room full of loudness. In a room full of silence, I must watch my mouth. My father, on the other hand, was louder than anyone else. He talked more than he’d listen. I was painfully shy.
The wilder my father grew, the more I shrunk. Every inch of my body tried breathing in the room. The air delivered vital intel for my next move. The messengers would crawl, itch, stretch or tighten beneath my skin. Navigation. It comes in handy - knowing when to disappear. To eat myself. To wring myself; turn little; go quiet. Go unnoticed. And if someone did notice me, what was left to hurt or tear apart was just a tiny fragmented piece of paper of the once much bigger picture.
I could leave with just a paper cut.
Tiny bones on tiny bones.
I am so little,
I have no lungs,
I cannot breathe.
“Nice girl, Peter”
“Sweet girl, Peter”
“Smart girl, Peter”
Whenever someone gave me a compliment, my father lit up. Every compliment I received, I never perceived as mine. I was a mere vehicle, funneling vital life force directly into my father. Like a conduit for energy. An exchange vessel. I let it all run through me. I held on to nothing. Here is my humble sacrifice. I was of his rib after all.
“Your eyes are my eyes. We are warriors.”
I was born into this world flavoured with intensity. It’s only natural that I easily feel at home in rough waters. One of the hardest things I continue to learn is to let stillness and peace be equally as exciting as intensity and electricity. To learn that sometimes aliveness feels like a gentle trickle and not only but, also sometimes simultaneously, a gushing river.
Just like the ocean current, I’ve always magnetically drawn to waters resembling the reflection of my first ocean. Charismatic men. Beautiful men. Long-haired, wild-blooded men. Men who talked more than they’d listened. Men who liked the reflection of me, more than they liked what was beyond the veil. Men who liked the idea of getting to know me, but never got to know me. I wouldn’t let them. I didn’t fully know. I wasn’t fully known.
We lay back to back
Before we laid close
My spine is exposed
Your skin is cold
The silence is suffocating
I know it’s time to run
Men, who enjoyed the warmth of my flickering flame and the exchange of energy, but feared the wildfire feeding the ember. Men, who in some deep, unconscious ways seemed addicted to the circulatory system of my life force.
“You are my drug now.”
Men, who were vitality lit up by me. Men, who needed a Sun, but told me I was the Moon. Men, who wanted to possess me, indulge me, eat me alive. Men, who wanted a Muse, a Mirage, a shared rib.
Rip my skin.
Kiss my bones.
Swallow me whole.
I wanted a man to want me like that. Whenever a sweet, gentle lover wanted to embrace me, I wrenched away in disgust. Home was not an embrace after all. Home was hell. Only when I began searching for home in the mirages of men, did I realise just how fractured my reflection was. How choppy my first ocean had been. I didn’t know that water could be still. I thought quiet water meant dead water. I thought I spoke the tongue of love fluently.
The soil I was seeded in, was fertilised by the belief that the actualisation of the woman happens through the man.
The rib.
The narrative was inhaled like a waste spill, well-hidden in the web of normality. Normal is not natural. Normal is whatever pool you marinade in most frequently.
If you want charisma, you marry a charismatic man. If you want protection, you marry a protective (possessive) man. If you want to be an artist, you marry an artist. If you want to be a star, you marry a star.
But don’t marry for money.
It’s inevitable that we find ourselves attracted to partners who represent a part of us that we innately seek to unfold and evolve. Something coiled and dormant within us that yearns to be awakened through the mirroring of another. But the ability to leave the loading pad of the reflection of our partner, and move our vision into reality, is the art I never thought possible.
When I was 6, I would often slip away into a daydream where Aaron Carter picks me up after school in his limo. Because he is a star, now so am I. I never thought I could be a star in my own making. The Sun in my own solar system. A macrocosm in my microcosm.
Most men I ever dated wanted a muse, a projection, a fantasy: a mirage of who they thought I was. There is not much difference to being a mirage than to being a model. You are a living embodiment of others' vision. A vision, in particular a femme vision, rarely has a voice. “What a vision!” and the sentence most often stops there.
I know exactly how to look at a man in a way that captivates him. To grant him my attention. My beauty, my mystery, my history, in ways where he’ll do anything to keep the reflection lasting into eternity.
But that’s all that it is. A reflection of a reflection. A mirage of a mirage. An I for an eye.
It’s a dependency on a hollowness that so desperately wishes to be whole.
I was never taught that my creativity, my beauty, my mystery, my yearning for more; could live interdependently, for my pleasure and experience; only.
Autonomy.
Whatever gift has been granted upon me, I must lay upon the altar of the father.
I am of the rib,
but I am not the rib.
I am of the ocean,
but I am not the ocean.
When I grew up, I witnessed how a woman owed it to her man to lay her beauty, her sexuality, her vitality, her autonomy before him. Like a sacrifice to their union. An act of love would be to let the man enter and swallow her up whole. Her nectar became his medicine. Her magnetism became his magnet. Ironically, what initially drew him in, would eventually be transferred to him. All of her became his possession, in totality. She was no longer a creative, singular expression, but a Moon in his Solar System.
A rib of a rib.
A Moon reflecting the Sun.
A few months ago I woke up:
“I am not the moon.”
My creativity, my sexuality, my sensuality, my beauty, my wild, my quiet, my soul even; I still laid upon the altar of the father. I was still looking for daddy.
A fear, so deep, revealed itself to me as I began unraveling what it’s like to be in this world when love in relation to another is no longer an act of total and utter dissolution of self. A submission. But rather, a joint connection of two entities. A surrender.
Without the male gaze, without my first ocean, I felt like a woman of no country, no land. Who am I, without the emerald eyes to see me? Validate me? Mirror me? Witness me? I thought I wanted none of it, yet it was all that I kept searching for.
Your eyes are my eyes.
See me.
Love me.
Validate me.
Tell me I’m good.
My father molded me in his own reflection. Built me from his own rib.
In some obscure Freudian way, he turned me into the living mirage of his visions of a woman. A Scent of A Woman. My teacher called it: emotional incest.
It started at the very beginning. Even before divorcing my mother, my father was tenacious in his ways of conducting the mental, psychic, and creative direction and development of me. Nausea arises from the depths of my inner landscape when I think: Was I more of a project, than a child? A projection, rather than a human being: flesh, blood, bones et al.? Was I a canvas for a mad man?
I was raised with a vigorous devotion to the virtues of being a civilised, expressive and more importantly, a visible human being.
Firm handshake.
Keep eye contact.
Straighten your back.
Stay out of averageness.
Rebel against the bourgeois.
Deny capitalism.
My father implanted a grid in my psyche that left me alienated from most of my peers. I couldn’t relate to their happiness. I thought of them as oblivious. Their existence, superficial. Meanwhile, I fought to stay alive in an all-consuming current of crazy that now lived inside of me too.
Joy to me is still the most vulnerable place I can let myself go to.
But
Soil can be turned.
Water can move through anything.
What once was hollowed can be whole. Again.
The flowers I’ve grown in my new soil are treasures of a strength, a vitality I didn’t know was alive within me. But one day, it began sprouting from the deepest part of my internal garden. Some broke through concrete. I have been alive this whole time.
I broke free of an ocean and carved myself a new home.
The ocean I call home now is not always quiet and still, but it’s warm. It is kind and even when wild, I feel safe. I enjoy all currents and particles of life moving through me.
I didn’t crash but collided with another body of water. He became my lover and beloved.
The eyes of my lover are blue, like the spring sky, not emerald. These eyes don't care about what they look at; they see me.
I see me.
“What do you love the most about me?”
“Your heart, your mind and the softness of your skin.”
The love that lives between us is fuelled, not by friction, but utter and complete, tenderness. The love that we share is not a sacrifice, but a surrender.
The love that we share is an act of will, and a choice to love, and to be loved back.
You are the honey
To my milk
I am not religious but I enjoy reading texts of faith and religion. I devour them through the eyes of a poet, a mystic and mostly just a human being. My favourite part of the Bible is not Genesis 2:22-23, but 1 Corinthians 13:12. I was 13 when I read it for the first time. A priest had just cut an apple in two. She held up one half of the apple and pointed to the core that resembled a heart: “Love is in everything. It can be found anywhere. Pay attention.”
1 Corinthians 13:12 has been embedded in my psyche ever since. It was, as it revealed a journey I wasn’t aware that I had already begun.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know only in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
Through the waves, the veils and the mirages of my first ocean I have come to fully know that I am fully known. To myself. My bones. My flesh. My rib. My ocean.
And I am no longer looking for Daddy. ◼
Breath taking, captivating and so insanely deep and opening that had me drop some perceptions right there, realizing and feeling how crazily powerful the human being can be when it recognizes the power that lies within that reveals when finding home within oneself. This would be the type of truth in writing that would live on my nightstand. Thank you for every word you put on paper
Amanda my baby! I am blown away by you… your discovery, your analogies, your truth, your creativity, your honesty, your depth, your new found freedom. I am happy and sad and hopeful all at once after reading this.
This is a spectacular piece, so deeply personal yet crystal clear and sparkly like the diamond you are. I love you. Thank you for sharing your incredible journey <3 mama Anna