How the Truth Was Better than Any Advice My Dad Could Have Given Me

Growing up, my Dad was the coolest man on earth. Bell-bottomed jeans, tight white cotton tees and a dense beard to match the decade. I didn’t see him often, nor even regularly, and in between, I pined for him. It felt like my first experience of unrequited love.

Sure, I know now that he loved me deeply but he was too scared of being a father and all the tied down, daily drudgery he believed it to entail - so starkly contrasting it was with the free love, folk music and anti-establishment fervour that was all around us. He was terrified of the weightiness of what was expected of him and thereby compelled to run from what a family represented, run from the two he loved the most — me and mum. It was a recipe for longterm heartbreak for us all.

Over the years, now married to his third wife, he became an older man. Sometimes now he is wiser. Certainly along the way he was more honest.

In the early years, each word he spoke was gospel. He would say let’s go camping, I would say that sounds wonderful and do my darndest to ignore the rain and the freezing cold weather to be the daughter he wanted. If he said something was great, I agreed, followed it wholeheartedly. He was a writer, so I thought I should write all the time because that must be the coolest thing in the world just like him. I have pages of painstakingly put together stories that make little or no sense, me trying to be clever and authorly, as a six-year-old.