I don't know if you can ever look at me the same way. Ever understand me. Ever think I was nice or even capable of loving someone. I don’t know if you can ever forgive me or even consider continuing to be my friend if I told you this one thing about me: that even when I knew my eighty-five year old father was on his deathbed, there was no doubt in my mind or heart that I would be at his side. I refused to see him. Though his sister, my aunt, called to tell me he was dying, I had asked her if there was anything he needed to tell me. She said no. That settled it. How can you forgive someone when they haven’t asked to be forgiven because as far as they were concerned, nothing needed forgiving. If he didn't need my forgiveness for his long list of abandonments, abuses, and negligences, if he didn't need my forgiveness for being absent from my life, then there was no point in my being by his side. In my books, forgiveness is a two way street. If he hasn't asked for forgiveness, I cannot give it.
That was about ten years ago, maybe more.
About five years ago, as I was clearing stuff out of my basement. I came across letters written to me over the previous forty five years. The last one may have been in the nineteen-nineties, when email took over, and letter writing began to vanish along with typewriters and landline telephones. There was one box of letters i couldn’t bring myself to open. Feelings of nausea swept over me and I kept putting it off, turning away everytime I got near it. In the meantime I had signed up for my first creative writing course…nothing too threatening….which was offered through the TDSB's Continuing Education program. It was in that class that I described in great detail an event that happened to me when I was fourteen. When asked to read the story aloud, I was shaking, and my mouth felt like rubber tires that had lost their air. I could hardly enunciate those words describing the scene of that trauma and the words I managed to utter…..”you’re killing me.” These are words I said to my father as he was strangling me and very nearly succeeded. That class unsealed the envelope of my silence, and energy and strength and fearlessness flowed out of me. I’m ready, I said to myself, to read each and every one of those letters my father wrote to me in those subsequent years for the last 25 years, up until 1992. I was hoping it might change the negative impact he had had on me, but instead it only confirmed what i still believed to be true about him - that there was no love for me flowing with the ink that drew out the words, nor between the lines or spaces of words, nor apologies either. Nowhere was there evidence for all I had hoped to be given as his daughter. Instead all I could read into his letters was how he clinged to my sense of duty as his daughter, yet not ever feeling or expressing his own paternal responsibilities or feelings, nor ever expressing any concern whatsoever, for my well-being.
Feeling like some kind of cathartic transition had occurred, I then decided to shred the letters, and spin them into a yarn, and although i didn’t have a specific project, I knew I would start to incorporate them into my artwork, for me the only means of transformation, of draining the trauma of this event from my body, and subsequently, changing how I saw this relationship.
While spinning strips from his letters I had the most incredible insight. That the relationship with my father was one that was composed of only letters, even when I was a child living at St. Brigid's Home in Quebec City, where I remained for nine years, until the age of fourteen. The illusion of a relationship consisted of these letters, a relationship that didn’t exist outside of the parameters of an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper. Letters, he thought , would be enough to persuade me of my duty to him as his daughter but they did little to bridge the wide divide between us, the distance physically and emotionally that he maintained through the years. I realized that he used his letters to conceal the truth of our relationship. Its funny how one can spend almost an entire life not noticing something that was so evident. He stopped writing to me when I was about thirty because I finally told him what I thought of him: that he had not earned the privilege of being called 'father' or 'dad' because of his absence emotionally and physically, throughout my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Telling him this lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. And from that day, I never heard from him again. If closure means closing the book on a relationship, then you could say, I achieved closure on that day. For so long I had kept that book open hoping to write new chapters in which we could have a relationship but when a person doesn’t love you, its just not possible. Once I could accept that, could accept the hardest thing of all for any child to accept, that a parent doesn’t love you, maybe even hates you, and blames you for all their failures and shortcomings, its very freeing. To live denying what I knew to be true was crazy making. He only wanted the benefits of being a parent, but not the responsibilities that went along with it.
Recently, while working on my Masters in Creative Writing, I read and learned a lot about epistolary practice and epistolary novels, and how in fact, letter writing became the jumping off point for novel writing, at first employing the same conventions. I began to see a connection to this letter writing convention as leading me to my own path as a writer. Letter writing was a river, I realized, a vehicle with which to float and paddle and navigate towards the immense ocean of creative writing - fiction, non-fiction, poetry and many other genres.
After reading all this, you may still never want to be my friend. You may never care to understand me. And you are right, and here I quote, Souvankham Thammavongsa while being interviewed at Toronto International Writers Festival, "I'm not that nice." But I am proud of myself for taking care of that inner child and protecting her from a father who didn't love her. I am proud of myself for putting my feelings first and not his, eventhough it took me thirty years to do so. I don't need to forgive him, because now I can thank him. Thank him for the life lessons I learned from him. I learned who not to be. I learned what not to be. I learned to work hard and to love hard and to give a damn, because he could not.
