I sent one more email, explaining in the clearest way I could that I wasn’t going to respond anymore and that I needed him to leave me alone for a while.
It was a pretty run-of-the-mill unexpected death. My nana hadn’t been sick, but had never been healthy. She had a heart attack, her second one in ten years, alone in her bedroom one night, and one of my aunts found her body the next morning, stiff and appearing to be scared, an image I would prefer not to hold on to for the rest of my life, but I guess whatever.
I was in Ian’s car a hundred miles away, already having a bad morning because I’d gotten an email letting me know that I didn’t get a job I was really hoping to get, and was running late for the job I still had.
The minute I found out, I became jealous of my former self, the
self from just a few seconds prior, for getting to feel bad about something as trivial as a job-related email. Then I got mad at myself for wasting my thoughts by creating unnecessary nostalgia around a negative feeling when I could be productively mourning. Then I got mad at myself for continuing to let my mind focus on itself, to keep wandering away from my nana, who was now dead. Dead, I thought. DEAD. Do you get it? My mind couldn’t seem to comprehend the word.
Not long after I hung up with my mom, I realized I was wearing braces that I couldn’t finish paying for, and that the braces were pointless anyway because I couldn’t possibly pay for the actual implants that the braces were preparing my mouth for.
I also realized that I had left some important work papers at home, so I called my boss and explained, while sobbing, that I was on my way but that I needed to go back to get the paperwork I’d forgotten and that I’d be a half an hour late and that my nana had just died.
“Don’t come to work, Chelsea,” my boss said. “Please, take a couple days off.”
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to go see my family, but I didn’t want to stay home either. I wanted the day to pass without my having to decide what to do with it. I wanted my inner self to disappear and leave just the shell of me, unable to have thoughts or know what my thoughts were or to feel disappointed by the emotional immaturity of my thoughts.
Ian thought we should go thrifting.
“Maybe you’ll find something that will remind you of her,” he said.
I thought it was a dumb idea, but I agreed because I hated thrifting and I figured it would be a good setting for my misery.
We drove to thrift stores in our area, got hot tea at Starbucks, and talked about little unemotional things. How to shine boots properly. Ian’s fourth-grade teacher. The order of the zodiac. I remained distracted and emotionless, except for some surges of love and pride toward Ian for his aptitude in taking care of me. I found nothing that reminded me of my nana at any of the stores, although at the end of the day I did go into Safeway to buy a giant Mr. Goodbar, the kind she always kept hidden in her dresser.
There would be no funeral. That was obvious fairly soon. No one was planning one. Her body sat in a funeral home for five days while her seven children collectively refused to discuss what to do with it.
The five sisters, my nana’s daughters, were suddenly on very bad terms. One would only talk to two of the others, who wouldn’t talk to each other, though one of those sisters would talk to one of the other sisters, who wanted to talk to three of the sisters, but none of those sisters wanted to talk to her, so she left drunken messages on all their voice mails. There was one who didn’t talk to anyone, as far as I knew, and, lastly, my mom, the fifth sister, who would only consistently talk to one sister, but would sometimes take calls from any of the other sisters but be mad about it. The two brothers didn’t talk to any of the sisters but possibly talked to each other, and one would sometimes mail long, angry, handwritten letters to each of the sisters. I didn’t think this was any of my business until my aunts started blocking me on Facebook. I guess they didn’t want me to read their belligerent rants to and about one another.
And then, one by one, my cousins blocked me as well.
My nana and papa had done a pretty good job of fucking up each of their children in a special way that was completely unrelatable to any of the unique ways in which any of their siblings were fucked-up. But my cousins and I had always seemed to be fucked-up in a similar way. We each had the burden of trying to love our parent in a way that would make up for the love they’d missed out on as children. We were each our parent’s one chance at unconditional love. But my cousins and I couldn’t bond over this, because bonding over it would mean talking about it, which would mean betraying our parents, which would damage the unconditional love we were responsible for giv-
ing them.
The fact that my cousin Alana blocked me was especially hurtful. She was four years younger than I was. We had lived together at various times when we were younger and saw each other weekly, if not daily, throughout our childhood and adolescence. She had always felt like a second sister to me, a sister I didn’t completely get along with and who was always around, which felt like just what a sister close to my age should be.
I texted her, and she didn’t respond. I texted her again, and
she didn’t respond.
My silence seemed to provoke my dad more than my short
emails did.
Sometimes the messages he left would be sweet and sad, just a simple “I miss you,” and I would consider writing back. But al-
most immediately after the nice ones he would send mean, angry messages about what a horrible person I was, how heartless I was for the way I was treating him, and it would remind me why I had stopped talking to him.
I blocked his email address and phone number. He made new email accounts to email me from, like YourSisterMissesYou@gmail
.com or [email protected]. I blocked them all.
He had his three-year-old daughter leave me voice mails, saying things like “Chelsea, why don’t you want to see me, it makes me sad,” his voice softly prompting her in the background.
“Your sister is going to call you in five minutes,” he would text from some unknown number. When I didn’t pick up the phone five minutes later, I would get a series of angry texts about my “responsibility” to my “sister”—a word that was technically accurate but that I had a hard time applying to this child, whose family didn’t feel like my family.
“She’s going to call again in five minutes,” he would text. “Please pick up this time.”
And when I didn’t pick up: “Stop playing games.”
I had gotten a new job at a web design company, and part of my job was to write blog entries for a fairy-themed website the company managed. I was getting paid more than I ever had in my life, and was making payments toward my braces and saving for the implants.
I would see my dad’s dozens of calls and messages all at once when I looked at my phone at the end of the day, his emotional roller coaster playing out while I had been obliviously writing a blog post about the fantastical myths and legends of England. The disconnect between our realities was incredible to me. It was amazing how angry I could make someone simply by being at work during working hours, how “childish” and “attention-seeking” I was being as I wrote about changelings at a wage that allowed me to pay for the dental implants I’d been needing for ten years.
My dad’s child’s mom, Rozanna, called me half a dozen times, sometimes with seemingly genuine requests that I communicate with their three-year-old, and sometimes with resentment and frustration in her voice. Feeling guilty about her child being manipulated into feeling unloved by me, I called Rozanna and explained my feelings.
Rozanna sounded rational and levelheaded during our conversation, and I was proud of myself for calling and talking to her. I remembered how much I had liked her. She agreed that the fact that my dad was coaching their child to call me was shameful and wrong, but tried to convince me that my bad relationship with him didn�
��t need to interfere with my potential relationships with the two of them. I agreed to consider visiting them, and she agreed to keep quiet about any future plans to do so.
The next day I received several angry messages from my dad telling me not to even think about talking to or seeing his daughter without his supervision, that it would be traumatizing for her to see me without him around.
The situation, strange and opaque to begin with, had turned into something entirely unrecognizable. It had been uncomfortable to begin with for me to purposefully refrain from communicating my feelings. I loved communicating my feelings and believed that honesty was the solution to pretty much every interpersonal problem. But talking seemed to make things worse between me and my dad. I had asked for space to figure out a new way to approach our problems, and my request wasn’t even heard.
Even though I wanted the harassment from my dad to end, I didn’t change my phone number, in case Alana wanted to reach me. I kept wanting to text her, to figure out what had happened, what had changed so drastically between us that she couldn’t respond to a text.
I also couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her situation. My dad’s behavior towards me when I tried to distance myself from him vindicated my decision to allow the distance between Alana and me to grow. She had made it clear that she didn’t want to talk to me. The kind thing to do was wait for her to come back around. I waited for her to text me, wondering if she ever would.
“She’s turning twenty-two today,” I said.
The next year I said, “She’s turning twenty-three.”
I had flubbed both situations. I was doing a horrible job at being rejected and possibly an even worse job rejecting someone. I had tried to be accepting of Alana’s unexplained absence and it hadn’t changed her mind about me. I tried to give myself space from my dad as delicately as I could, explaining things to him as best as I could for as long as I could stand, and he’d ignored every single thing I asked of him. It had all gone completely wrong.
If it were anyone else harassing me, so persistently and for so long, I think I would have handled things differently. I would have been better able to ignore it, or to ask somebody to help me make it stop, or to give his name and photo to my friends and employers so they would know I was being targeted by someone unstable. I wouldn’t have been so fearful that people would judge me based on the quality of my relationship with my dad.
This realization made me angry with myself. It proved that my dad meant something to me. That, despite his not having any of the qualifications I considered necessary for him to be regarded as family (which could be as little as standing around in the same rooms every few years), biology had undermined my qualification system and made me kind of care. And it was the kind-of caring that hurt. Each new message from him brought a pang of guilt and dealt a blow to my desire not to give a fuck. Each voice mail from his baby was a chance for me to remind myself that I was okay with being the type of person who is an asshole to babies.
I printed out restraining order paperwork from the internet and tried to understand my options. I was pretty sure I had to file for a domestic violence restraining order, since we were related. But the phrase “domestic violence” made me feel overdramatic. He had never been violent toward me. I didn’t fear for my life or my physical well-being. This was a simple case of incessant, unwanted communication from an estranged parent. Why wasn’t there a box for that? I filled out the paperwork and printed copies of his emails, but I never sent them in. Would I really have the guts to appear in court, as was required, and tell a judge I was charging my dad with domestic violence because I didn’t want him to talk to me? That I just never wanted to ever read another email that demanded I talk to some little girl I didn’t want to talk to? Wouldn’t that undermine victims of physical domestic violence? Wouldn’t I tell someone else in my situation to just suck it up and ignore it?
Why couldn’t I just ignore it?
I threw my restraining order papers at the wall and cried.
Maybe I was making things harder on myself. Maybe I should just talk to him one more time. Maybe he would be satiated if I called and talked for a few minutes every once in a while for the rest of my life. Wouldn’t that be better than all this?
I thought about my mom. She must have felt so helpless and betrayed and alone when my dad had disappeared and she became a single parent at seventeen. But despite a period of depression when he left, her descriptions of her pregnancy and my babyhood are filled with happy adjectives. At some point, she told me, all her heartbreak over my dad turned into loving devotion to me. I was not a reminder of love lost, but a symbol of how much love she was capable of feeling, of the possibility that still existed of finding someone worthy to love.
She could have asked his friends where he was, but she didn’t. She could have pursued child support, but she didn’t. She could have showed up at his father’s house and demanded someone be responsible for my dad’s poor choices, but she didn’t. She accepted his decision. She left him alone.
My dad’s dad called me. My grandfather. This was a man I had spoken to once before, briefly. A man who had lived within miles of me my entire life, and who hadn’t once tried to see me.
In this first-ever phone call to me, he left me a voice mail lecture about how important it was for me to see my dad’s child, how it was my responsibility to be a good sister to her.
I finally changed my phone number.
My dad continued to send me emails from a variety of new email addresses. They were mostly “nice” emails: “Thinking about you. Call me.” Or “I love you. I miss you. Hope you’re doing well.” But the fact that they were “nice” didn’t change the fact that they were unwanted. They were almost more unbearable than the fucked-up messages, because it was as if he’d never heard a word I had said. He wasn’t arguing with me anymore. He was simply ignoring what I had said and what he had been doing to me for months and acting as if nothing had ever been wrong.
He purchased things from my Etsy store, where I could not block him. At first I sent him the items he bought, with a fake return address (in an attempt to be a responsible small-business owner). Then I sent the items he bought and included a letter telling him that if he ever truly hoped to talk to me in the future, then he needed to respect my request for space and that I would contact him if I ever wanted to talk (in an attempt to be civil, but firm and direct). Sometimes I refunded his purchases and didn’t send them (in an attempt to be ethical but nonparticipatory), and sometimes I kept his money, didn’t say anything, and never sent the items he bought (in an attempt to financially discourage him from continuing to buy things from me). I had to stop using my real return address on all outgoing packages, as I never knew if he was placing orders under a pseudonym.
He left comments on comics I published online. I emailed the publisher to ask to have the comments removed, and kept an eye on my postings after that.
He emailed random tertiary friends of mine he had never met, asking for their help getting in touch with me. I apologized to my friends, explaining and defending my choices to people who shouldn’t have been involved at all.
He sent me an email that said that if I didn’t respond he would come to Oakland and hunt me down.
The phrase “hunt you down” sounded violent, and suggested to me that he was not in control of his emotions. But it also seemed so disconnected from reality, so confused and sad, so powerless. And, actually, I realized, he was mostly powerless. What could he really do, even if he did “hunt me down”? Make me talk to him? Make me like him? Change his personality? Change mine? Change our history?
All at once I felt very strong. Between his long absence and his clumsy return, the decision of whether he was going to be in my life had not been mine to make. But now, it was clear, it was mine, regardless of whether he chose to accept it. I didn’t have to like him, and I didn’t have to talk to him. He could spend all the en
ergy he wanted trying to change those facts, but they were my choices to make. And they always would be.
I’ve come to think of all my past selves as if they are my daughters. I want to stand up for them, to make sure that even when they were being very bad they were still loved and understood, even if only by their future self.
I’ve thought a lot about the particular past self who promised never to write about her dad, to never give him the satisfaction of knowing he had an effect on me. I know how angry and unlovable that past self felt at the time, and wonder if my writing about him now, against her wishes, would feel to her like yet another selfish adult disregarding her feelings in favor of her own interests.
And though I’m comforted by the fact that this past self seemed to know it was always her story to tell or to not tell, I have to admit that what she didn’t yet know is that I never keep promises to myself. Promising myself I’ll do something is basically a dare to all future selves to do the opposite. It’s actually pretty infuriating.
acknowledgments
Thank you, Yuka Igarashi, Monika Woods, Ian Amberson, Elizabeth Ellen, Wah-Ming Chang, Chloe Caldwell, and Stephanie Georgopulos. Also Mom, River, and Kylie.
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