Give Up And Go Away
-title may change-

Hey, what do you say?
Why don't we give up and go away
Hey, hey, hey
What do you say?
Why don't we give up and go away
— “Give Up and Go Away,” Strippers’ Union Local 518

My father is a big man. Not physically, oh no, that would be too easy to understand. He’s what you’d call average: he stands barely two inches taller than his daughter at five-foot-ten, with the lean frame his mother passed both to him and to her granddaughter, and is beginning to develop what I call the middle age belly. His cheeks are reddened by the scars of teenage acne and adult alcoholism; his eyes are a watery blue-grey and bird-bright. His hands are only slightly larger than mine, though wider than my narrow ones, and are chapped and weathered by fifty years of living and nail-biting.

My father’s voice is what’s big. To hear him shout you’d think he was six-five, a solid two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle, and nobody to mess with. Or maybe a raving lunatic. Just a thought.

You’d be wrong, on the first count at least. If you asked my dad, he’d tell you that I’ve been deliberately messing with him since I was fifteen years old. See, that was the first time I disagreed with him, and the first time of many that I put my head on the proverbial chopping block and let him yell at me.

My dad is a very affable man, so long as you agree with him. For a long time when I was young, I took my dad’s side of things after my parents’ messy divorce, and in the way of teenage girls, was a complete [insert rude word here] to my mother, and Daddy’s little girl.

As I’ve aged my dad and I have argued more frequently and more vehemently—often, I’m sorry to say, in front of my younger brother. We disagree on a number of things, but that isn’t the worst of it. Making up is nearly as hard on the emotions as the fight itself, for one basic reason.

My dad is incapable of saying sorry. After a fight that led to me living with my mom full-time for a month, his manner of apologizing was to say “Sorry, but if you hadn’t [insert misdemeanour here] and if you’d just [insert his idea of what my personality should be like here] I wouldn’t be so stressed and I wouldn’t get mad at you.”

Call me crazy, but I think that negates the attempt at an apology. Still, I wanted my dad in my life, so I swallowed my pride and went back to the little apartment where I spent most of my time being yelled at for minor infractions like forgetting to polish the sinks because I’d been doing my homework, and biting my tongue to keep from yelling back at him—or crying. When we fought again, though, three short months later, I got out and stayed out. Living with my father had become just one of the chores he delegated to me, something to suffer through in silence so that it would be over.

Even now, when I haven’t lived with him in two months, my dad is fond of calling me at my mom’s once a week, asking me if I’m going to stick with this “arrangement”, and when I, with my stomach quivering with the guilt he means to instigate, say that yes, I am, he always heaves a long-suffering sigh and makes me squirm.

Many would say this is typical eighteen-year-old girl drama, a way to rebel against my father in a small, sheltered town. But you can ask my mom, because she’s been there too, and she was pushed out before I was. Ten years later, my mother is happily remarried, to a man for whom I have more respect than I do for my father, with another two children rounding out our already-larger-than-the-common-1.2-kids family, making life hectic but never dull. My father, meanwhile, has tried multiple internet dating sites, dated women as far away as Cobourg, and continues to mutter about them not “meeting his standards”—when he isn’t complaining about his work hours or the size of the apartment he’s meant to get out of since he moved in five years ago.

Who do you think has the problem?

In the four years since I first disagreed with my father, I’ve learned, as so many young people do, that my father is flawed. I’ve learned that he will not say sorry, because that would involve taking the blame for what he’s done. I’ve learned that he would rather cast the blame for his perpetual unhappiness, alcoholism, tobacco use and drug use, on his only daughter than accept that his own choices have led him to where he is today. I’ve learned to be independent, as my father’s evening work hours forced me to be. I’ve learned I don’t always need to lean, but can stand on my own, even if my balance is less than perfect, and as a result I’ve learned that even if you wobble, you don’t have to fall. I’ve learned that I don’t want to be “Daddy’s little girl”, but my own woman, independent, without my father’s doubt and mean-spiritedness dogging my every step.

And I’ve learned that to do that, I can’t live with him. It’s not in my nature to be quietly subservient and nod and say “yes, Daddy” when he complains, just as it wasn’t in my mother’s to put up with his verbal and emotional abuse when she knew she could have better for herself. So I’d have to say I believe in survival: in putting up with what you despise to keep the peace, maintain the pretense of a normal family life rather than a fractured and miserably unhappy one.

That said, I also believe in getting out while the getting’s good, and not regretting events that came to pass because of circumstances beyond your control. I don’t believe in backing down, even to your own father. If that makes me a bad daughter in his eyes, I can live with it.