A word count of seven hundred words. All purely fiction of course.

I wrote this for The Guardians Experience a few months ago:


It’s often been said that as a girl, the most important relationship you will ever have with a man, is the one you have with your Father. Psychologists have even said that the first feelings of love a little girl feels for her Father will be the most important of her life, and that they are integral in shaping and affecting the relationships she will have in the future. I don’t know what this says for me, as I have never had a relationship with my Dad; not because I was a child from a divorced family, nor was he robbed from me by some cruel, untreatable illness.

The youngest of three, and the only girl in the family, I always felt an outsider. Never sure whether to be one of the boys, or a Daddies girl, I often tried anything to feel accepted.
It wasn’t really until I arrived at middle school that I realised my Father wasn’t normal. At home time, I would often go around to a friend’s house for dinner. I’d assumed as a little girl that Fathers just didn’t have relationships with their Daughters - I’d always been taught by mine that little girls were to be seen and not heard. But, when I saw the happy family life that my friends had, and how they had love from both parents in equal measure, I began to ask my Mum questions. Answers were never given, just words that – even as a child – I knew were being sugar-coated to save me from asking them endlessly.

Parent’s evenings would come and go. So too would school fetes, special assemblies and away games. Medals were won. Certificates were achieved. Gold stars were given, and school photos were taken. All were apparently milestones in my life. But none of them were ever acknowledged by my Dad, or were enough to make him love me.

Over the next twenty years my relationship with my Father was non existent. After I graduated from University I gave up entirely on trying to understand him, or to try and find ways to fix him, and make him into the kind of Dad my friends had. Following a string of abusive relationships -that all seemed to follow the same pattern -I decided, in 2000 to leave Britain, and start a career and a new life for myself in America.
After three years in L.A I managed to put my English degree to good use, and finally found a publisher who signed my first book. After that, things happened pretty fast, and the years surrounding that time are a blur. My career took off, with the book receiving critical acclaim across the world, meaning my life became a whir of book signings, press junkets, meetings, and interviews. However all were merely distractions from the huge empty whole I felt that my life really was.

Since I’d put an ocean between myself and my Mother, I began to resent her hugely for never leaving my Dad, and never giving me the chance to feel the safety or comfort of having a normal male role model. Because of this, and the fact I blamed her for the – by now – countless abusive relationships I had been involved in, our relationship remained tentative up until the point she passed away in 2004. Her death hit me hard, and made me re-evaluate the path I was on, and the life I had made for myself; for the first time, I owned up to myself how unhappy I felt, and decided to see a counsellor.
At first, I felt the experience to be a complete waste of time, and couldn’t see how talking to a stranger about my Father would ever benefit me. Eventually though, I started to realise that I wasn’t to blame. The mix of frustration and guilt I had felt wrapped around my body slowly started to loosen. It took a while, but two years later I met a lovely man, who slowly restored my faith in men, and we now have two beautiful children. He is a wonderful Father to them, and seeing how much they adore him banishes any last embers of sadness that flickered inside me.