After lost decades, a fresh outlook leads to a reunion

Earlier this year, I saw my father for the first time in 35 years. It was a relatively calm, if emotional, reunion and the thing that struck me most was that this man – my father – was not in fact the monster I had been led to believe. I grew up on the Scottish coast in a family home where harmony was an unknown quantity, and barely a day went by without some form of acrimony or aggression between my mum and dad, if not a full-blown fight behind closed doors.

Like many dads in the ’70s, my father wasn’t around very much because of long working hours and the traditional gender roles of the day, so my siblings and I grew up strongly attached to our mother, hanging on her every word. In our house, the only acceptable line on my dad was negative.

Angry, stupid, ugly, useless, incompetent, unintelligent, violent … the list of adjectives employed to describe my father was endless. I used to feel so sorry for him. My mother told us she only married him because in 1973, at 30, she was in danger of remaining a spinster and her parents had more or less arranged it with his widowed mother. By the time we left him, we children – aged 8, 9, and 10 – had become heavily enmeshed in my mother’s one-sided version of domestic events. We stood united. He was the devil incarnate, and without him we would sail forth into a perfectly happy life together. Except, of course, we didn’t.

We left our cottage by the sea and moved into a cramped terrace in the city, and for a few years my mother was happy, so we were all happy. She was involved with a new man, who promised to marry her, move us all into a big house and buy us a pony. The only drawback was that he wouldn’t leave his wife, at least not for my mother. In the end, he ran off with a terminally ill heiress, leaving my mum to a broken heart and facing the difficult prospect of single parenthood in the ’80s.

After that, life was pretty awful. Before we left him, my dad was the scapegoat for all that was wrong with my mother’s life. But now, that role was reassigned to us children, with me, the difficult, middle, non-compliant child, copping the full force.

Until I reached adulthood, when the turbulence of my personal life led me into psychoanalysis, I held my father entirely responsible for all that had gone wrong within my family. But once I started re-examining the story with a neutral other who was able to listen and reflect and re-orientate me, my perspective began to shift. I realised I had never known my father, never considered his side of the story. Under my mother’s influence, I had become alienated from and unavailable to him, physically and emotionally.

Growing up without a dad meant I learnt to question authority from a young age. I had a lot of teenage freedom and I gravitated towards feminism with ease. But I had no confidence when it came to boys. There was also no glue in my family, nothing that held us together, despite all the turmoil and pain we’d endured, so when I left university, I moved to Sydney, and later Tasmania, and left my fractured family dynamic far, far behind.

For a long time I wondered about reconnecting with my father, but it was my own children who eventually drove me to write to him. Born and raised half a world away from the traumas of my childhood, their perspective was uncontaminated and free of judgement. To them, my dad was an unknown grandpa, and they were curious about him. Clearly, this was no longer just about me.

So I found my dad’s address and I wrote him a letter, but for two years I kept it shut up in my desk, unable to see past a massive can of worms and my mother’s thick, black anger. When I eventually dropped it into the mailbox, I felt sick and frightened, but I knew I’d done the right thing.

Within a couple of weeks, I received a letter back, and a whole tangle of emotions ran through me, including relief and surprise. These were not the words of the household monster with whom I had grown up. This was evidently a man with a big heart who had, no doubt, been quite broken over past events. My one comfort was in knowing, after all the pain, grief and toxicity of our household, he had gone on to find love and happiness with a new wife and two more daughters.

I eventually met my father during a trip back to Scotland this year. My family and I were visiting friends and family, and my father came to meet us for lunch with his second wife, a lovely woman from France. There were nerves and tentative hugs, surprisingly easy conversation and the inevitable rush of hurried, awkward questions and answers somewhere in the middle. There was also a lot of dormant pain, and, when we parted, tears.

I don’t think having a second family has made up for my father’s loss of his first three children, and while my brother’s kids are now keen to make contact, my sister still believes our father is the embodiment of evil. But at least there has been some resolution, and I am profoundly grateful I have finally reconnected with him, for my sake, as well as my children’s.

Ultimately, the past is about the future and I want my children to step forward in their lives with strength and love, knowing who they are, and feeling confident about where they’ve come from. It’s time to tell a new story.