My Father Was Never a Dad

My father doesn’t deserve to hear the kindness in the word dad because he never acted like one

Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash

My Father Was Never a Dad

My father doesn’t deserve to hear the kindness in the word dad because he never acted like one

My elementary school lied to me.

We had these Arabic lessons on the importance of family. They would teach us stories and poems about why we should love our fathers and then why we should love our mothers. Again and again, they would repeat these two orders. Only briefly would they mention what matters to my older self: your father should love you. This was mentioned once or twice, but I think that even if they said it a hundred times, it still wouldn’t become my truth.

“What exactly is my truth?” I would ask myself whenever I looked in a mirror; despite never getting an answer, I would still ask. Delusion could take you so far, but not far enough.

I must have a truth. We all should have one, but mine is hard to admit. I’m not the best at writing novels because I’m not good at solving conflicts; I’m only good at creating them. I would give the reader a sample of my life where I let my legs lead me toward conflicts and I would enlarge them and then I would do nothing. Does staring count? Because sometimes I would stare at my father, but that doesn’t make me stop hating him.

Yes, I just betrayed what my Arabic lessons taught me, but my father betrayed them too. Love should come from both sides and my instinct to love him was stolen from me by his hate. He is an angry man. Someone you should fear, and you can’t imagine how much I feared him. (I try to tell twenty-four-year-old me that I don’t fear him anymore, but that’s a lie).

He would scare young and old alike and he never minded that kids would cry when he looked at them. I believe that a new wrinkle gets added to his face every time he makes someone cry. I gave him most of his wrinkles, just like he had given me all the mental illnesses that my therapist told me I had. At least I don’t have daddy issues. I have what I like to call man issues. This is when you hate all men, even the ones who aren’t scary. You hate them all because you’re waiting for the yelling or trying to guess where the next punch will land or trying to know how many times will they make you cry during the week.

I always skip any TikTok video with the sound “I hate all men.” I skip before the “but” part comes because my hate has no buts, just like my father’s hate has no reason. This was also hard to come to terms with. It took me years to convince myself that I didn’t do anything bad enough to make him hate me. He is just an angry man who ruined the 1+1=2 equation.

I made up my own version: you know someone + you hurt him = he starts hating you. The only part that exists in this equation is the result because I never knew my father. I only know that he is an angry man who made me an angry woman with man issues. An angry woman who still has a young girl inside of her crying and begging someone to tell her why her father hates her. Or why he isn’t kind? Or why he doesn’t look or sound like the other kids’ dads?

Or why he is an angry man.

My elementary school lied to me again.

The teachers would ignore the curriculum to give us a life lesson every single class and a recurring lesson was that your parents are allowed to be mad at you. They are allowed to be angry. They are allowed to hit you. They are allowed to commit all these crimes because you must have done something bad. So we should sit there and let them take out their anger on us and then they would be our loving parents once again.

I’m now twenty-four years old and I’m still sitting here letting my father take out his anger on me. He was never a loving father, so my elementary teachers did lie. Perhaps my father was a version that never came with the curriculum. Or perhaps I was never the kid who would make their dad a loving father.

In fact, I don’t think I ever was a kid because kids don’t have to learn about hate before they get to know love. Kids don’t have to grow up crying in the streets because crying in their house equaled being given more reasons to cry about.

In my country, Egypt, we only celebrate Mother’s Day. We don’t even know anything about Father’s Day. It is like heresy to us, but recently people started celebrating it, while I had one more reason to cry. It was already hard enough to hear my friends talking about their dads while I thought of going home to find my father with his usual frown, yelling at me for something neither of us knew, since he would sometimes do it for no discernible reason. Now I have to see millions of Egyptians posting photos with their dads and saying kind words and getting kind words in return. The only time I heard kind words coming from my father was in my dreams and these have been rare. Nightmares are more frequent.

Since I will never get the chance to honestly write, “Dad, I’m thankful for having you in my life,” I would like to write “Father, I’m thankful for you because you taught me how to hate and how to be angry. You taught me to be you, although this was a lesson I didn’t ask for.”

Of course, I won’t tell him that just like I would never tell myself that I still fear him.

What else could I be thankful for? Maybe the fact that whenever I apply to any job I have to answer a question about whether I’m disabled or not. My answer has always been “Yes.” My eyes would scan the list of illnesses that they provided and I would count what I have just like I did when my therapist first told me that I’m broken; that is what I heard.

Depression. Anxiety. Borderline Personality Disorder. PTSD. Maybe there are more that my therapist didn’t realize existed, and maybe she will never notice. How could she when her patient sees her every couple of months because I have to lie about going to therapy? So thank you father for teaching me how to lie.

Thank you for breaking me. Or ruining me. Or both.

He ruined many things just like he did with my memories of elementary school One time a teacher was asking us the usual classist question “What is your father’s job?” My answer was a “beggar” because of how many times my father told us that he didn’t have money to spend on us. He always had money for himself. This was the first time my mom was called to school. What an amazing childhood.

When Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died came out, I said, “Cool, I can write something similar.” I only have to wait until my father dies. I’m counting. I’m also praying, despite not being a religious person; when your abuser passes seventy years old and he doesn’t seem to be near death, you try any option available. I tried to die first, but that was a failure.

I also failed at teaching myself to speak kind words, but that’s because I was never introduced to them. I was never introduced to a good reason to call my father “Dad.” It’s too kind of a word and he’s too angry of a man. I’m too broken to try to be shaped into whatever form he wants to see me in.

I spent years searching for an explanation about the hate and anger inside him. Then he passed them down to me. I became the female version of him when it comes to being filled with hate and anger. Now I have to pretend that I’m surprised whenever someone says that we’re similar. But I know we are. We’re similar despite my attempts to be nothing like him. My mom once told me that I have the same loud sneeze as him. So sometimes I practice holding my sneeze so I won’t think of myself as his daughter.

I tried to search for answers in therapy. In the last four years, I’ve seen three therapists. The first two told me that he was a psychopath. My new therapist told me he has some kind of paranoia. Even in therapy I carry reminders of him inside me, so many that my therapists have to give two diagnoses: one for me and one for him. But I appreciate that. I hold these explanations close to my heart. I reassure my mom when she is at her weakest that he isn’t a normal person. That we didn’t do anything wrong that made him turn out the way he is.

My family members still have a glimmer of hope that things might turn around. They have hope that one day he will be a dad who provides and protects, not harms and rejects. I don’t share their hope, but I don’t blame them for theirs. He always presents himself as an angel, and sometimes as God, who has never done anything wrong. So it can be easy to believe him when he says that everyone is wrong and he is right. He says it with such authority that you can’t help but doubt yourself.

But I finally stopped doubting myself and my hate for him. Maybe I stopped doubting my hate when he was diagnosed by my therapists. Or maybe I stopped when my step-brother, who had schizophrenia, committed suicide and my father used that event to manipulate us.

I remember the day my step-brother died and how my father’s main concern was how much does meat now cost. His next concern was asking me how to save a Facebook post so he can post it later. I remember staring at him with disbelief as he asked me to make a collage of pictures of my dead step-brother to go along with what he wrote. That day, the doubt stopped because I was looking at someone who looked for attention even when his son has just died.

I feared him on that day. Recently, I admitted to my new therapist how terrified I am of him. She looked at me and joked that she’s also terrified of him. But it wasn’t a joke. I saw in her eyes the fear and I remembered elementary school. I remembered when he visited my class one time while there was no teacher in the room. Chaos was everywhere. The moment my classmates saw him, they stopped playing out of fear of the menacing-seeming man in front of them. When any other dad came to the class, they never stopped playing. My father was the one who brought death to a lively place. Years later, the same classmates tell me they remember how terrifying my father was.

So while my family keeps searching for answers after years of suffering and abuse, I hold the truth I know close to my chest.

I know my truth. It’s one where my father was never a dad.

Salma Ahmed is a 24-year-old Egyptian writer. You can find her here.