Bad Dad Club

a break from regularly programming: a story told through someone else's song

I’m veiled and vague in my references to my father - particularly in my writing - because I don’t wanna trauma dump!! and I don’t want to seem like I’m sharing family drama for attention but!! My god!! What is art and writing for if not for processing?!! \

So here I am, finally doing what I’ve wanted to do for years. Minus the shit that’s just not my story to tell. Woo!

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There has been one singular piece of art that has been able to reflect my relationship with my father and all the feelings with it: Kyoto by Phoebe Bridgers.

“You called me from a payphone

They still got payphones

It cost a dollar a minute

To tell me you're getting sober

And you wrote me a letter

But I don't have to read it”

Both when my father was in prison and before, I wrote him so many letters pleading with him for more from him. I wanted him to express some kind of authenticity in personal accountability so I can use it as currency in my own desire to forgive him.

“I'm gonna kill you

If you don't beat me to it

Dreaming through Tokyo skies

I wanted to see the world

Then I flew over the ocean

And I changed my mind”

To elaborate, when I was eighteen, my father was charged with possession and distribution of ch*ld p*rnogr*phy, and was in prison for 6 years. Fucked, right? Why couldn’t it have been for drugs? Or robbery? Or tax evasion?

We didn’t have much of a relationship even then - we had just talked on the phone for the first time when I was about sixteen. We were planning to meet for the first time, and he called to ask if he could bring his wife too. I said no, so he, for lack of more elegant words: chickened out. When I was nineteen, a couple friends of mine, each with their own version of a shit father situation coined “Bad Dad Club”.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what kind of man this mysterious figure of a father was. With no context at all for why he wasn’t around, I imagined him as relatively normal. When I was eight or so, my best friend saw on her mom’s phone that my mom might have been in contact with my dad - we hypothesized this shadowy figure as perhaps someone real, with ambition, maybe he started his own shoes company.

“Sunset's been a freak show

On the weekend, so

I've been driving out to the suburbs

To park at the Goodwill

And stare at the chemtrails

With my little brother

He said you called on his birthday

You were off by, like, ten days

But you get a few points for tryin'

Remember getting the truck fixed

When you let us drive it

Twenty-five felt like flying”

The first birthday present I got from my father when I was 23, in the first year of my relationship with my now-husband. It was a mysterious package, sans birthday card? $200 in two dollar bills and a stuffed banana slug because he thought I went to UC Santa Cruz. He had gotten out of prison relatively recently and I don’t know if he could even get a job at that point. I spent the two hundred dollars and gave away the banana slug. The first birthday card I got when I was 21, and he shared some irrelevant story about his own 22nd birthday. I threw it away.

When I was nine, my stepdad at the time sometimes used to let me drive around the parking lot of the church where my piano classes were in the Blue Chevrolet truck. We’d listen to Car Talk on the way home.

“I don't forgive you

But please don't hold me to it

Born under Scorpio skies”

My sister was raised solely by my dad and his wife, and obviously, I was not. She did not have an easy adolescence, but compared to her relationship to her own mother who had abandoned her he was solid. In her reports, before all this, before she know about me, in her mind, he still was a funny well-meaning, albeit mentally ill, man.

So in spite of him leaving my mom before I was born because he was young and scared, in spite of him failing me again and again, and most notably, in spite of his crimes, I went through phases of varying attempts at forgiveness. Varying movements towards establishing some kind of a relationship over the last decade through letters and talks with my sister and text exchanges here and there. Sometimes this strained attachment with my sister because she found this task of a relationship easier than I did.

While I was trying for her (and the little kid in me!), I was also trying to model being a good prison abolitionist and practitioner for transformative justice by trying to craft a narrative where people could change for the better, no matter how taboo the crime.

This was fucked and hard because he gave me nothing back, even though he said he wanted a relationship with me. All I asked for was honesty, I was naively hoping he could show up for me. I hoped for him eventually expressing his inequivalent regret and outrage at what he did, a real dedication towards change and therapy, and that while the prison system is fucked for not helping him more, he was trying. He kind of did..at first, for a very short while.

But he’s not that kind of person. He’s the “take the easy way out” kind of man. It started when he backed out of his decision to start a family with my mom, and readily disappeared from our lives.

I decided sometime last year that it wasn’t my moral responsibility to have forgiveness for him, or to carry the burden of his transformation, because that wasn’t going to save him or give me peace. Reports from my sister reflected this reality: he started having resentment for the therapy and was actively breaking rules of his probationary release. One particularly heinous note is is hint that it was a victimless crime.

“I wanted to see the world

Through your eyes until it happened

Then I changed my mind

Guess I lied

I'm a liar

Who lies”

Last night I found out my father is going back to prison for 25 years. Same shit, this time his (Very Young) ex reported him and the FBI did a raid. They seized a suspecting tablet. Can we return to this verse?

“I'm gonna kill you

If you don't beat me to it

Dreaming through Tokyo skies

I wanted to see the world

Then I flew over the ocean

And I changed my mind (Woo)”

Signed,

Forever member of Bad Dad Club