💔 When Father's Day Hurts: The Stories We Don't Tell
If Father's Day feels complicated for you—if it brings up longing instead of gratitude, grief instead of celebration—this one's for you.
“Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.” ― Terry Real
Note: The catalyst for this post
If you identify with the quote or pic above, this post’s for you. It touches on my complicated relationship with my father. He has passed now. I’m still trying to make peace with all that was left unresolved. I decided that I’d take the wisdom out of my unresolved stuff and put it in an essay for a contest. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped. What I expected to take two days took two weeks. I don’t know that I love the resulting essay, but I can live better with it.
The Weight of Being "The Strong One"
You know the drill. You're the one who shows up. The one with the steady hands and the backup plan. The emotional shock absorber who keeps everyone else functional while managing your own chaos—illness, heartbreak, dreams on hold.
Being "the strong one" sounds like a compliment until you realize it's also a prison.
We live in a culture that loves transformation stories but ignores survival stories. Everyone wants to talk about choosing peace, but what about when peace requires decades of untangling damage you didn't create? What about when the only way forward means facing painful truths about the people who were supposed to protect you?
Someone once said: "It's not your fault that you were hurt. It is your responsibility to heal." That line haunts me—not because it's harsh, but because it captures the impossible math of family dysfunction. We don't get to choose what we inherit, but we do get to choose what we pass on.
The Names We Use to Protect Our Hearts
For years, I called them Mama and Daddy—soft names that held all my hope for tenderness that never quite came. Even as an adult with children of my own, those names carried the fantasy that maybe, someday, I'd be the daughter someone cherished out loud.
Then life happened. Comments. Reality checks. The slow recognition that some fairy tales don't end with happily ever after.
I switched to Mom and Dad. More distant. More protective. Safer.
Maybe that's what holidays like Father's Day do—they force us to reckon with the gap between what we wanted and what we got. If this day stings instead of soothes, you're not broken. You're not behind in your healing. You're just honest about what it's like to love someone who couldn't love you the way you needed.
The Essay That Changed Everything
What I'm about to share took me two weeks to write. Two weeks of crying, deleting, rewriting, and sitting with memories that felt like swallowing glass. It's the story I never planned to tell—about my father, the impossible role I inherited, and what happened when I finally stopped waiting for someone to choose me and started choosing myself instead.
It's messy. It's real. And it might be exactly what you need to read if you've ever felt like the family disappointment, the forgotten daughter, the one who gives everything and gets crumbs in return.
For paid subscribers, I'll be sharing the full essay tomorrow.
It's about learning that some stories don't have neat endings, but they can still have powerful beginnings. It's about discovering that the respect you didn't get can become the respect you give—to yourself, to your children, to the world.
If you're tired of carrying weight that was never yours to bear, if you're ready to stop apologizing for wanting more, if you know in your bones that your story matters even when it doesn't fit the greeting card version of family, then this essay is for you.
Can you relate? I’d love to hear how you’re changing your unwanted inheritances.
Ready to read the rest? Upgrade to paid subscription to access the full essay, plus monthly bonus content for those of us rewriting the rules on love, family, and what it means to be enough.
Because the daughters who weren't "Daddy's girls" and the boys who weren’t “little buddies” have the most important stories to tell.
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In the essay behind tomorrow’s paywall, I share how I faced my parents’ decline, my own chronic pain, and the weight of inherited expectations—while trying to build my life while caregiving, empower my soul, and disconnect the burden of generational trauma from future generations. Some souls collapse under the weight of responsibility; others are the doers because their resilience, vision and love can.