As a kid, did you have a good dad or a bad dad? Is the answer that simple?
I learned about my father’s passing many months after his death, when a surrogate court sent me an obligatory legal notice. I was 48. We’d been estranged for over a decade.
In his will, my father passed me over, stating not once but twice that under no circumstances was I to receive any of his money, even if all other possible beneficiaries were deceased. In my father’s view, it seemed, I was unforgivable.
Before I learned to swim, my father treaded in the deep end of our town pool, lifting his leathery tan arms, opening his hands to catch me. When I jumped, he took his arms down and I slipped underwater, floundering for a few seconds before my father pulled me up to the surface. He laughed hysterically as I coughed and tried to catch my breath.
He said we should try again. This time, he promised he’d catch me. I got out of the pool and went to the edge. I bent my knees and hesitated.
“I’ll catch you,” my father repeated, his head and hands beckoning.
My legs shook, but my desire for my father to catch me was dogged. I wanted him to be the kind of father who would catch me, so I held my breath, closed my eyes and jumped, hoping that this time—this time—he’d keep his word. He rarely did.
Years later, I read Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door, and recognized my father.
My love for my father was dogged. He wasn’t all bad. He could be caring. When I was growing up, he sat beside my bed when I was sick, gave me a pep talk when I felt anxious before my violin auditions, and took me to the Girl Scouts Pop Hop, doing the do-si-do even though, according to my mother, he hated to dance. For years, I pretended that good father was the whole of him, until I couldn’t pretend any longer.
When I was a girl, I begged for a dog, but my father said we couldn’t have one. As consolation, he offered to be my pretend dog. He got down on all fours and barked and panted. I was enamored and enthralled until he pushed me over and lowered his body onto me. I had no power to prevent what happened next.
I often drowned in my father’s sadism, his torrents of psychological and sexual abuse. In my 30s, when I began to speak and write about my childhood experiences, people I knew and people I didn’t know asked the same question: “Have you forgiven him?” Some urged me to forgive him, citing forgiveness as an edict, offering lines from the Bible. My father was a flawed human being who deserved forgiveness. Good people forgive. Was I a good person?
My father never offered an apology for his behavior, nor was he ever officially reported for or convicted of any crime. While he once, over the phone, admitted he’d done the things I claimed, he quickly retracted his statement. He said my perception of his behavior was incorrect, and my unforgivable accusations were akin to sticking a knife in his chest: He was the victim.
In a research study on forgiveness, Harvard University epidemiology professor Tyler Vanderwheele states that forgiveness may boost mental health and well-being. Vanderwheele defines forgiveness as “replac[ing] ill will toward the offender with good will” and names empathizing with the offender as an essential step toward forgiving.
I sometimes wonder if my father ever felt empathy or good will. I felt empathy and good will toward my “good” father, but not the abuser father. But ultimately, empathy and good will had nothing to do with my coming to forgive my father.
A dog did.
In my mid-40s, living solo during the pandemic, I adopted Beau, a yellow lab mix from Mississippi, who arrived with severe separation anxiety. When I went to work, Beau went to doggie day care, a place where he felt happy, safe and loved—until he was attacked by another dog. Beau’s injuries were so serious that he needed emergency surgery to repair the damage. For days after, he wouldn’t stop crying, panting, pacing and hiding in my bathtub.
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The vet prescribed a sedative (Xanax) that the clinic didn’t have in stock. Because most pharmacies forbid dogs, my only option was to go to the CVS drive-thru with Beau in tow. I pulled up, put the prescription in the tube, pressed the button, heard it airlift, and waited.
The intercom voice was high-pitched, taut. “What’s your dad’s name? I can’t read the handwriting.”
Beau, wearing a cone, whimpered in the backseat.
“It’s not my dad,” I said, leaning my mouth toward the plastic device, hearing my voice rise. The vet had noted “dog” on the prescription. “It’s my dog.”
In that moment, the seed of forgiveness took, though I wouldn’t know it until months later when I came to see that Beau’s trauma, and the aftermath, had triggered my history with my father, and with it, all of my unresolved feelings: shock, anger, betrayal, the loss of safety in a place where safety was promised, the lack of control, the question of whether I’d live or die—above all, the grief that the good father I’d wanted and needed was gone, the bond between us destroyed.
Even before Beau’s assault, my connection to my father reverberated in my dog’s simple presence—his panting, his barking, his clumsy way of playing. Worse, in proximity to a scooter rider or rollerblader or other random triggers, Beau suddenly turned from a quiet, sweet companion into a lunging, growling beast—something my nervous system registered as akin to my father’s quick tonal shift, from caring man to violent abuser.
Only when I learned to disconnect my dog from my father could I fully accept the truth of my past and be present, with compassion, understanding and unconditional love for Beau. In the days after his attack, Beau’s suffering gave me the opportunity to heal the part of myself who still suffered from my childhood violations. Only then did I begin to grieve what I’d lost. I never expected forgiveness to follow.
Forgiving my father wasn’t something I wanted to do. Forgiveness didn’t even feel like a choice, it was just something I came to feel.
Forgiving my father came as a release of my resentment and his corrosive grip on my life. Forgiveness was my letting go of the pain of my father’s actions and my attachment to the good father I wanted and needed, a construct long dead. Forgiveness was part of my process of mourning the loss of someone I loved and had once believed in, in order to survive.
I came to understand that forgiveness isn’t a pass, but a passage. When I forgave my father, he wasn’t exonerated. He didn’t receive any benefit, not because he was no longer alive, but because forgiveness, as I came to know it, isn’t an outward act at all, but an inward gift of emancipation: I’m no longer my father’s victim. I’m simply me. Free.
This Father’s Day, what dogged thing will you do to be more free?
*This post is excerpted and adapted from an essay previously published in HuffPost (2023).
