Why I Write

The First Father

I write to process what happened to me, and to give language to something most people carry without any.

A father exerts a pull on a child's life whether or not he is in the room. Mine was present enough that I knew what his attention felt like, and absent enough that I spent thirty years trying to get it back. To a small boy he was the coolest man alive, long hair, classic rock cranked all the way up, letting me steer from his lap. He was also a meth addict whose rages broke our family apart. When I was fourteen the police raided our house, and I spent two hours handcuffed in the front seat of a cruiser while the neighbors came out on their porches to watch. I left his house not long after. What never left was the hope that he would clean up and come back.

He did not have to be there to keep bending the path I traveled. He was gone and I was still orbiting him.

Almost everything I built was a response to that. The theology, the career, the run of mentors and pastors I burned through, the achievements I stacked up hoping he would see them. Every one of those structures was a boy trying to answer the same question. Am I worth coming back for?

The Metaphysical Father

The largest thing I found to fill that space was a literalist Christianity. It started when I was twelve, when I told God I did not believe in him and, twenty minutes later, was set on fire by a can of gasoline. I spent the next two weeks having the dead skin scraped off my shoulder with a blade and no anesthetic, and I decided the two events were connected.

Three years later I heard about Jesus at a church camp and found something I had been starving for, a father who would not leave.

I spent the next twenty years building a wall around the emotional safety I had found so that nothing could take it from me. I built it out of certainty, every belief locked in place, no room for a single one to be wrong. A wall like that holds right up until one brick moves.

In 2015, I became a father myself. I would sit in the dark rocking my daughter to sleep and feel a love I would have walked into anything to protect, and the thought would come, not as an argument but as a problem I could not get out from under. I had been that helpless once. The God I had built my whole life on was supposed to love me with that same love and more, and he had watched my childhood happen and had not stopped it.

Then my father died, and with him went the thing I had quietly believed my faith was for, that it might one day reach him and give him back to me.

It took years to work through the structure, and what finished it was trauma therapy. My faith was real, and it had grown in soil that was poisoned long before the seed ever landed there. Working that ground was the only way I was going to get better, and the plant that grew in it did not survive the reworking.

It gave way in October of 2023. What I lost was not an argument. It was my ability to see God as the ever-present father I had taken hold of at fifteen. The wall I had built did not allow for doubt or complexity. God had to be controlling everything, or he could not be the Father I needed him to be. And if he controlled everything, then there was real grief in what he had not done for me as a child.

Where I Am Now

I am not trying to rebuild that wall. What I am learning is that I can hold something without needing to be certain of it. I still find the story of the incarnation beautiful, a God who steps down into the muck of being human rather than managing it from a distance. I cannot claim it is literally true and I no longer try to. I have found that holding it as hope rather than as fact is a great deal closer to what I actually feel than the certainty ever was.

Mostly I am working out how a man generates his own gravity once the old sources of it are gone, and how he does it while raising four daughters who need him to be steady.

My Story

Most of what I write here is one continuous story, told across a series of essays: how my father's absence shaped the belief system I built, the surrogate fathers I went looking for in his place, and the long slow failure of all of it. The essays are in order, and the order matters.

I am not writing from the other side of the wreckage. I am writing from inside it.

Index of Full Essays