Daddy in the Walls.

Reading Alison Bechdel’s recounting of her estranged relationship with her father seemed so familiar to me. I wasn’t entirely sure why I felt this way, at first, but then, it hit me. His cold, detached attitude reminded me so much of my own father.

Okay, so here’s the short version of my life in relation to my parents’ ill-fitted marriage.

They met in Med school. My mom’s dad had just died. She was lonely, and they were both falling for a delusion they mistook for love. They married. And then they added kids to the mix. Smart, eh?

It was no big secret my father NEVER quite enjoyed the company of children—something that unfortunately seemed to transcend into his relationship with his own children. Planned and expected, by my father, I was referred to as the baby or her baby (subtly abdicating any responsibility over me to my mother).

I guess I should share that I have spoken to my father about this. He claims to have felt an immediate connection to me the day I was born, changing his earlier sentiment. I've always felt torn between what to blame for his behavior: my father’s naturally scientific and critical personality or his and my mother’s unhappy marriage. Nowadays, I imagine the latter being the direct result of my father’s impossibly unemotional demeanor.

Growing up, my father had installed an office space in our house that was supposed to be restricted to him only. Being the curious, rambunctious children my little brother and I were, of course we ignored any boundary drawn around this new space. Both my parents worked a lot, so we took full advantage of the time we had to explore his work space (that is whenever our nanny didn’t catch us). The very thought of our chubby, dirty fingers smearing and smudging his cheap bookcases and outdated Microsoft computer absolutely sent him bananas.

It would be a careless understatement to simply call him a neurotic perfectionist.

For years, I wondered how my father dealt with it. I was always reminding myself of how he slept in the guest room on the other side of the house. How he yelled at us so often. How he stormed into his office, locking himself away for the rest of the night. It was much more difficult to convince myself that underneath his blatant misery, he loved me.

Bechdel’s depiction of her relationship with her father is so tragically candid. Every aspect of their interaction is laced with tension. This does not seem falter, even at his deathbed. She retells of her unusually awkward interaction with her deceased father. After presenting us with some imagery referring to her father’s “rough and dry, scraped clean” face (Bechdel 51), “wiry hair…brushed straight up on end”, and “tiny blue tattoo on his knuckle”, she then admits to paying her respects for “as long as [she and her brothers] sensed it was appropriate” (Bechdel 52). Obviously, her disconnected manner of regarding her father stems from years of mistreatment and neglect and an unconventional upbringing (as is explored through her sharing of the family business). Yet, it is on page 86 that I begin to understand why she might have decided to share this story in the first place.

After years of struggling to claw through my dad’s thick shell in search of some inkling of adoration, I understand what it is to grasp onto a single strand of hope for connection. The least I can say is it’s gotten a lot easier to feel something more than the reverberating sound of his office door slamming on the walls.

I credit that to divorce.