I still want my dad’s approval.

I don’t think it was always bad, the relationship between me and my father.

I have very faint, distant recollections of times when we had fun together, when I was very young. Mostly involving playing with the dogs, or planting flowers outside, or spending time at his mom’s house with my aunts and uncles.

I don’t know when things changed, but they did. Maybe when my younger siblings came along, and he really began to feel the financial pressure of having a family. Maybe when I started to look less like a baby and more like my mother, whom he already resented. Maybe the seed was planted much earlier — his own beloved father died very suddenly less than two weeks after my birth, so perhaps the association doomed us from the beginning. Or maybe it was just a natural progression of a father/daughter relationship with a man who had deep emotional and psychological problems, who steadfastly refused to get help and most of the time wouldn’t even acknowledge them.

I don’t know and I suppose I never will. But when things changed, fear entered my life, and it’s never left.

And despite the years of abuse and subsequent years of therapy, I still desperately want my father’s attention, approval, and affection.