I Used to Be A Daughter

I chose being me instead.

author and her newborn daughter

I didn’t choose to be a daughter. None of us choose to be born. Some of us were willed into existence; whether it was an easy journey, or heartbreak after heartbreak until wishes and wants turned that break into a heartbeat. Some of us were meticulously planned; thousands and thousands of dollars and painful injections, or long waits on lists just hoping for someone somewhere to produce a child that needs to be taken care of.

And some of them were like me. A late night drunken, lazy mistake.

I’m not ungrateful to have a life. I love being alive. But I never asked to be here. I never asked for the title, daughter. I didn’t audition for the role. I didn’t apply for the job. I know I can say that I earned it… but that’s only because my version of daughter was so very hard.

Being a daughter was never easy. Maybe I missed the instruction manual, but the version I was given was a lot of work. It was confusing; rules changing every day, and I never knew what facets of my daughterhood were allowed to be shown and which were meant to be hidden for another time.

Being a daughter felt like being cloaked in a metal suit I was expected to grow into without any direction. And for almost four decades, I wore my daughter suit. I wore it when its sharp edges cut me and bled me weak. I wore it through love deserts and blame monsoons. I polished it when it rusted; mended it when it began to fall apart. It was the only thing linking me to these people I was told to love and who were supposed to love me. This ill-fitting, cumbersome covering is all I had to try to feel safe.

But I never did grow into my daughter suit. And it slowly began to suffocate me. The very thing I was put on this planet to be turned against me and started to steal my life.

I am no longer a daughter. And I will never be one again.

That’s the thing that no one tells you about choosing estrangement. There is a lot of loss; even when you’re the one who made the decision to stay away from the people who brought you here. You can feel happier and healthier than ever, and confident in your decision every day of your life. You can go weeks without thinking of these people; you can forget their very existence. You can recall moments and memories that feel like ghosts of yesterday.

But it’s not just the loss of people and future memories that have buried themselves in the deepest of graves. It’s the loss of a title that you can never recover that continues to haunt.

You can become a wife and not be one, and then become one all over again. You can become a mother several times over, even if loss finds you somewhere in the middle of your motherness. You can become a friend as many times as you wish, and move in and out of friending with as many people as life allows you.

But a daughter is meant to be forever. And when it breaks; when it stops breathing and dies, you can never become one again. A daughter and a mother, a daughter and a father — those are bonds that are meant to be strong and evergreen. Implied, even. An everlasting coupling that stands the test of time when all of the other relationships were choices. A bright and guiding star in the night whenever you need to remember home.

But for me, the choice that I never made became a choice I can never have again.

In the house I grew up in, love came with receipts. Invoices were kept and purchases were tallied to be used for battle. Both of the people who raised me were narcissists. Are narcissists. Unlike daughter, that’s not a title you grow out of. And when he applied alcohol to it, he became evil in a loud way. His temper was terrible. His fists were clenched more than they were open to another.

He blamed hitting me as a child on ‘the times’. As if punishing a child who wet the bed with the strike of a hand was ever acceptable. The amount of nights I woke up in wetness terrified of being in trouble, and snuck to find a towel to lie on are uncountable.

Sheets in that house were never washed. From childhood to teenagerhood, I cannot recall one piece of bedding being laundered. I didn’t even know you were supposed to clean your sheets or towels.

So I slept in my childhood mistakes every single night under that roof.

You’ve made your bed, now you must lie in it, a common idiom in that house, was literal for me.

Her damage was less anger-fueled and more emotionally applied. She was a proficient pout and a marvelous martyr who couldn’t be bothered for accountability. Everything was about her and done to her. Everything was rotten unless it was hers. Her damage was insidious and didn’t need to bruise to be felt. And I was the daughter who was never good enough, yet always being told to dim any light that escaped and threatened to compete with hers.

Everything was my fault in my version of daughter, and my worth lived entirely in being the Feelings Manager of the family.

I was the reason and the cause for the bad day, and the fixer and the keeper of the peace all at the same time. I learned how to code switch at such an early age, that I can sometimes still feel dizzy within myself. I learned to read a room at age five, to gauge that father’s mood by the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, or how the backdoor sounded when it closed beneath my bedroom. I knew how to contort myself into whatever shape was least likely to set something off.

I was good at it, too. Disturbingly good. So good that for a long time, I confused it for love.

But the problem with being the one who fixes everything that you are told you caused is that eventually, you run out of things you’re willing to break yourself against.

I never felt the people who raised me liked each other, but they said the word love a lot. To each other, to me. I had a lot of spoken love in my house, and to the untrained eye, we looked like we meant it. I never knew what true love was in that house, but I knew we say the word at the end of a phone call.

They fought a lot and they laughed a lot. When he stopped drinking, they never seemed to enjoy each other as much. An alcoholic who never labeled himself as one, he made the choice to stop drinking before he drank himself to cancer. She resented his sobering and tried hard to get him to fall back off the wagon. She would try to bribe him with sexual favors to get him to drink again.

Last I heard he had throat cancer. I was to blame for that as well. Was it the breaking of my daughtering that made him drink himself to cancer? Or was the damage already done? I’ll never know, and I don’t wish to.

The pandemic broke a lot of things. A lot of things that didn’t need to be broken and should never have bent to begin with. But it helped break up my family, and I’m glad that it did.

The pandemic helped break the last thread of a relationship I had been grieving my entire life. It had been dead for so long, and should never have been alive in the first place. I just didn’t realize I was woven into such a feeble fabric until they left for four months without a word, and I felt… nothing.

That nothing was so much of a something. I’d never felt nothing before. I had spent my entire life carrying such a heavy load for these people and the very moment they were gone, I felt weightless. Unfettered. I felt without something for the first time in a life where I was always with and withholding so very much. The absence of them was such beautiful nothingness, I immediately knew I could never be without it again.

So that’s when it all ended. That’s when it broke. It’s both a long story and a short one. It’s easy to explain and simultaneously requires a translator. But it needed to end and I’m thankful I was given the opportunity to usher it to a close.

Their version of the story is different. Their story is one that helps them continue to live a life of the blameless, heartbroken grandparents who lost contact with their only grandchildren for no other reason than their daughter is cruel and heartless.

It’s not always easy hearing lies about yourself. I’ve heard them all the way these things tend to travel — carried back to you on someone else’s breath like smoke from a fire you didn’t start. There are stares and glares and whispers and a lot of people have fallen from my life because of their story. It’s a small town, and that family I was a part of used to be the star.

I walked away from a legacy. Slow motion, with their smoke and flames rising behind me, I walked away from languid nobility and never looked back.

The lies don’t bother me much because I know the truth, and so do they. But they need the lies. And I don’t need to wave the truth like a flag.

Being an adult orphan by choice is complicated. It’s both the easiest and the hardest all at the same time. It’s easy because breathing is no longer painful. My joints and heart don’t ache from the continued contortion of trying to shape myself appropriately. I no longer perform illusions and tricks and emotional acrobatics during every phone call, every visit, every holiday. I no longer lose myself a little bit every single day.

That’s the easiest part.

It only becomes a little hard when I realize that I used to have a title that I don’t have anymore, and I can never do anything to get that title back.

I can’t force myself into daughterdom. And that’s just a weird fact I now embody. The moments when I realize this are small, but detectable. They come through me like a tiny ocean ripple that merely changes the shape of the sand beneath your toes. It’s not enough to move me, to pull me under or steal my breath. It’s just enough to make me notice something is different now.

Maybe I’ll hear the word, daughter, and it feels like a foreign language. Maybe I’ll fill out a form and remember that my next of kin doesn’t exist. I’ll watch a father hold his daughter’s hand on a walk, or play with his grandchildren in a park. And something in me softly notes the loss of a thing I never had, but know I deserve.

I don’t want it with them. The stability and comfort of what having a parent should feel like… I don’t want that with those people. But I know I should have had good parents. And I know I should still have them now. I am worthy of having people who created me want to stick around and see how this thing turns out.

But that’s not what I have. I re-raised myself after they left and did a better job than they ever did. I like who I am now. I’m nothing like them. I never was, but I tried to be. And that almost killed me.

Something that’s hard to explain, yet still easily possible to do is — I grieved parents that are still here. That’s the special kind of madness about this type of estrangement. Last I heard, they are alive somewhere. Living their lives under the umbrella of a lie they clutch so desperately. And I am here, living freely with the ghost of a label I will never be again.

Nothing I can do will change that. And as strange as that may be — just simply knowing that’s a door that is forever closed — I could never, ever go back. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be a daughter. I would be their project again. Their emotional landfill and their first aid kit.

I guess I was never actually a daughter to begin with.

I’ve made my peace with how my life is, was, and will end up being. And I want to be clear about what peace means. Peace is a word that gets romanticized into a fallacy. Peace isn’t the absence of grief. It’s not pretending that whatever version of this loss is isn’t a stranger that occasionally arrives unannounced and sits down at the table.

It’s not pretending there wasn’t any sort of loss to begin with, even if the loss feels like a win.

Peace is the knowing that I made the right choice. And I would do it again and again and again.

Peace is in my children, who get to grow up in a house where love doesn’t come with a contingency plan.

Peace is the life I built on the other side of a hurricane.

Peace is the woman I became when I stopped performing the show of Daughter and started being myself.

I used to be someone’s daughter. A name and a title that I never asked to have.

And now I am just me. Peacefully, me.

peace. And fully me.