Category: Mum and dad

Who is the man who I’m constantly attracted to?

Don Draper has a drinking problem, and his drinking problem is supported by his partners. It’s only because they support this drinking problem that they are even in the relationship in the first place.

I had a friend who when I ate lunch with at a Cantonese restaurant told me that my attraction to the dark types will disappear once I’ve made my peace with the archetype- which probably means, my father.

But why is the darkness so sweet and so tempting? falling into it feels delicious. And what are the times and reasons that we fall into it, willy-nilly?

I have had a rough week. Between deadlines and the gym, friendships and not having traveled for six months, my dad was in town.

Here is something I have realised about my father. He demanded everything and nothing from me. When he expected nothing, you felt all the freedom in the world, but he also expected everything, which meant that he would walk away from me as a child, on the sidewalk in London next to our underground basement flat-cum-caretakers-quarters (side-note: My aunt, when I had first started school, told me to tell everyone that my dad’s job was a ‘maintenance manager’ not a dormitory caretaker, which is what he was; she asked me to lie, maybe that was the first time, before I had hit puberty), if I didn’t obey him. I remember being on a small bicycle, we were perhaps riding to the park. He wanted to leave me there, because I had made one extra request– it was oh, maybe, that I didn’t want to bike 15 minutes, or something even more minor. That fear was incredible, and has lasted to today. I am always so scared of being abandoned, because of this extremely early period of abandonment, this experience of abandonment. Why would he do this to a child? It almost didn’t make sense, to leave a child on the side of the road.

His threat was abandonment.

I was listening to the RobCast yesterday (highly recommended!) and he had a line in there about being “Divine sons and daughters.” The idea, an idea that I had also read on the Bodysex website this morning, was that we are completely whole as we are. I hadn’t encountered this idea until a fingerful of years ago, and certainly I had no idea of this idea in childhood. I was always on the bicycle, with a father walking away from her because she had made a request. Always.

I was with a friend yesterday and we discussed givers and takers. The context of the conversation was with men and it sparked so much within me. My father was a taker. He took everything– my time, my energy, my love. And when he gave it was with the expectation that I had to return big things to him, like my unconditional loyalties or all the things which I could give to him.

But that was it- his love was conditional, and my love was unconditional, because it was a child’s love for a father.

The first time that I experienced unconditional love was with the man pictured, J. This photo was taken during our first Spring Festival together, so 2010, almost ten years ago, ten years next Spring.

It was such a strange (and sudden, to be fair) thing in my life that I didn’t know what it was– I couldn’t recognise it. What was this thing, shiny and sparkling which looked dull and strange when it first got there?

Because I guess when you’ve been brought up under the glare of only conditional love, you have no idea what it is you have on your hands when it arrives on your doorstep, unannounced, closing the door and hanging its coat on the hooks on the wall in your hallway.

That’s a giver.