Dear Dad,

Happy birthday.

It’s been roughly a year since I last spoke to you. I say “roughly” because, as you know, it was a gradual transition from the occasional e-mail or phone call to the infrequent text to just not responding to anything you sent me. And I stopped responding because I woke up one morning towards the end and realized that I hadn’t spoken with you or even thought about you in a long while, and I was okay with that.

See, the way I finally figured out how to get through to you was through silence. Because no matter what I ever had to say to you, you were only going to hear whatever you wanted to. I was always going to be the kid that your evil ex-wife turned against you, and nothing I could ever say or do was going to change that. I would fight with you and plead with you to understand that all I ever wanted from you was your love, but what I finally came to see after all the arguments was that you didn’t have any. For me or anyone else. Whatever path your life had taken to lead you to where you were had also ruined your ability to love other people. So in a way, you made it easy for me to fall out of your life completely. You’d been pushing me out for so long, in the end all I had to do was take one small step and I was out of it entirely. Now I’m no longer the daughter you lost in your bitter divorce, I’m no one.

Because of that, I find that I’m not nearly as tortured as I used to be. I’m still plenty jaded by you, but every day I lose a little bit of the wall you built for me. I give people chances, and they don’t always let me down. I give people my heart, and they take care of it. I give people my trust, and they don’t make me wonder what kind of mistake I’ve made in doing so. Every day that passes teaches me that you were a bad example of what normal people are: you’re not the standard, you’re the exception. After all these years, your grip on my life is starting to loosen.

There are still times that I think of you with a smile on my face, and those times are the hardest to get through. Whenever it rains, I sit in the big armchair by our picture window that looks out over the valley and I remember how you taught me to love thunder storms. I think about how you used to stand in the open doorway and listen to the deep thunder roll across the night air. I was always scared at first, but the huge grin on your face and your big arms around my tiny shoulders made it feel safer. You promised me that no matter how the sky lit up with lightning, no matter how angry those cracks of thunder got, the rain would always calm the night and still the noise. The distant rumblings as the clouds passed were like soothing apologies for the violence of the storm.

And something else reminded me of that side of you that I loved. A couple weeks ago, I bowled a 244. A 244!! I was hardly paying attention to the pins at all; I was just throwing the ball and laughing with my friend. Suddenly I noticed that I had somehow managed a strike in every frame except for a few! My very first thought was how excited you would have been to be there. I could see the smile on your face as you raised your arms in shared triumph: you would shout in that way that you do when you're excited about something, and maybe even do that silly victory dance for me. You would then walk calmly up to the counter and ask for a printout of the scoreboard from lane 20, because your daughter had just bowled a near-perfect game. And maybe, just maybe, you’d offer to buy me a Violet Crumble candy bar in celebration.

That day still creeps up on me sometimes, and I wish that I could have picked up my phone and told you about it. Bowling was always something that brought us together like the family we should have been. For ten or twenty frames, you were my dad and I was your kid; that was all we needed to know.

Now, though, my days are filled with other thoughts. Thoughts and events that I have no desire to share with the stranger you’ve become. The rational part of me, the part that will forever bear the slightest scar of you, knows that you are beyond reach and that my life is better without you in it. I’m happy and I’m thriving despite quite a lot of obstacles. You couldn’t ruin me the way you wanted to, and I’ve become someone who is loved and respected. I live my life with as much joy and passion as I can pack into it, and I share that with the people who support me.

I’m sad you’re not one of those people, but it doesn’t kill me like it used to. Every so often I cry for the life that we never could seem to work out between us, but now the pain has gone out of it. I’m just sad for you, daddy.

So on your birthday I just want to tell you this: I love you. I will always nurture the slightest flicker of hope that one day you’ll realize what that truly means, despite the years telling me that it will never happen. Should that day ever come for you, I hope it brings you at least a moment of peace in your lifetime.

Erin