The Parent You Never Had

Growing up in a room where nobody asked what you felt

The Room

I don't remember how old I was. Three, maybe four.

I remember the room. The door between me and everyone else. The knowledge — not thought, knowledge, the kind that lives in the body before the mind has words for it — that I had done something wrong. Eaten incorrectly. Moved wrong. Said something that didn't fit. Nobody explained what. I just knew I was somehow too much, or not enough, or both at once, and that the correct response was to sit alone and feel guilty until I understood what I was apologising for.

I never understood. I apologised anyway.

I have been apologizing for existing, in one form or another, ever since.

The Weather of My Childhood

My grandmother panicked easily. Heart palpitations, blood pressure drops, the particular dread of a woman who had survived two occupations and a husband lost too young. When the panic came, she would clutch her chest and cry out — I'm dying, I'm dying — in a voice that filled the house.

She wasn't dying. The doctors said so, every time.

I don't know how many times this happened. Enough that I stopped counting. Enough that the image is not a single memory but a pattern — the cry, the clutching, the panic spreading outward like a wave, and me in the middle of it, frightened, and invisible. Not once, in any of those moments, did she look at me and say: it's alright. You don't need to be scared.

It seems like she was the most important person in the room. Every time.

My mother was working. Or cooking. Or managing the house, managing her mother, managing the thousand things that a single woman manages alone. She loved me — I don't doubt this — but she had her hands full with everything that was visible, and what was happening inside me was not visible. It didn't announce itself. It just sat there, quietly, waiting for someone to ask.

There was no space in that house for a child's interior life. There was food, and work, and survival, and a grandmother who filled every room with her fear of dying. That was the weather. I was in it.

Nobody asked.

I absorbed. I was quiet, scared. I waited.

The Father Who Never Knew

My father died before he knew I existed.

He and my mother had an affair. He was married. She got pregnant. He died — by his own hand, or close to it, the story is murky in the way that family stories about unbearable things always are — a few months after I was born, before anyone told him there was a child.

My mother went to his funeral. She put a photograph of me in his coffin. This is your son. I thought you should know.

I cannot be angry at him. You cannot resent a ghost who never knew your name. But I have felt rage at what his absence left behind — the accumulated rage of a person who had to figure everything out alone. Not to take things from him. Just to not be alone. Just to hear a voice that said: I know. I've been there. You're going to be okay.

That voice never came. I became it myself, eventually. But the work was entirely mine.

I have cried exactly zero times about my father. Not because the distance is too large. But because I decided, somewhere, that I didn't have the right. He didn't know I existed. His grief was his. Mine felt like a claim on a man who couldn't consent to being claimed.

There have been moments — in the worst of the darkness — when that question stopped being abstract. Depression is not sadness. It is a weight, the kind where your mind starts looking for exits. I have been there. I have hit myself, tried to choke myself, screamed and wept alone in rooms. In those moments, the question was not philosophical: am I more like him than I know?

But those moments also became turning points. I learned — without medication, without a psychiatrist, without anyone — to climb out. Alone. Which is its own strange thing to be proud of, and also its own strange wound.

I know now how to find the floor when the darkness comes. And I know, somewhere, that my father did not.

My Daughter

I was not ready when she was born. Not in the ordinary way — nervous, learning as I went. Unready in a deeper way: I did not yet understand what it cost me to grow up in that house, in that silence, in that weather. I did not know what I was carrying. What you carry without knowing, you hand forward without meaning to.

The marriage ended. She moved to another country with her mother, her mother’s new husband, new brothers. We had agreements — she would come visit, we would have time together. Often something came up. A trip somewhere, her stepfather's family, plans that quietly replaced ours. I don't say this to assign blame. I say it because it is part of how the distance grew.

I remember a time we managed to meet briefly — half an hour in a shopping centre, almost by accident. And when I held her, I felt it: the stiffness in both of us. She stiffened. I stiffened. Two people who loved each other, standing close, neither quite able to arrive.

I was there in body. Somewhere else in everything that mattered.

Yesterday, She Made Cookies

Yesterday, my mom made cookies.

I was stressed — work, the kind of anxiety that makes you pace between rooms looking for something to do with your hands. I have a compulsive eating issue that surfaces under pressure. Not hunger. Something older than hunger — a body that learned, very young, that food was the available form of comfort, and which reaches for it automatically when comfort is needed. I have been working on this for years.

The cookies were on the counter. I walked past them four times, five times. Then I started eating them.

When she came out of her room, most of them were gone. She told me she had made them for her birthday. I explained — carefully, I thought — that I've asked her before not to leave food in plain sight. This is a conversation we have had before. More than once.

She said, "You're just making excuses," in a tone that made me feel three years old again.

I exploded.

Sitting with the wreckage, I understood: she and my grandmother punished me for eating incorrectly when I was three years old. Maybe four. Food was one of the things that made me wrong. And here I was, forty-five years later, in my own kitchen, being told that my struggle with food was an excuse.

The circle is so complete it would almost be impressive if it weren't so exhausting.

The Thing I Have Never Said

I have tried, over the years, to have the conversation directly. After explosions, the next day, I sat down and tried to explain. She hears the words. Something closes in on her. She becomes the injured party. I became the one who hurt her. We end up, always, somewhere neither of us intended to go.

What I have never managed to say — not in anger, not calmly, not at all — is the simple version:

Mom. I don't need you to fix me. I don't need you to feed me. I need you to look at me — just look at me, directly — and say: I see you. I know this has been hard. I'm proud of who you've become.

When I try to find the words, something happens in my chest — a tightening, a pre-emptive bracing, as though the body already knows the answer and is preparing. So I say something smaller instead. Safer. Easier to dismiss.

This is the more complicated grief. The one without a villain.

The hope survives anyway. Battered, irrational, forty-five years old — but alive.

The Boy He Is Going to Be

My son is two years old.

He doesn't know any of this yet. He knows that when he cries, someone comes. That is when he is afraid there are arms. That the world is, so far, a place that responds to him.

I am trying — consciously, clumsily — to be the thing I needed. When he is upset, I pick him up. When he is frightened, I don't tell him not to be. When he does something wrong, I try to explain why, in words a two-year-old can hold. I am trying to make sure he never, not once, has to wonder what he is apologising for.

When he wants to help me vacuum, I let him. Whatever he does, however badly, I don't correct it. I go over it later, quietly, when he's not watching. What I will not do is let the help become an obligation, the obligation become the evidence that love means labour. That ends here. With the small, badly done corners that I fix in private so that his willingness stays intact.

I don't know how well I am managing this.

I am broken in some places. I am also slowly learning to find the floor.

***

This is No-Mad Max. I write about the things men carry but rarely say out loud.You can also find me on Substack and Medium.