Mid 2011
She continued looking at me as she backed up across the parking lot and onto the grass lot which sat next to it. We were no more than twenty feet apart and she was holding her cell phone in her hand like a weapon telling me that if I came any closer she'd call the police. I knew she meant this. I knew this girl well. She's my daughter.
It was midday at the convenience store and customers were coming and going, gassing up the cars, buying things, and beginning to notice us. I had arrived only moments earlier and was putting the kickstand down on my bike when I saw a young girl coming out of the store who looked a lot like my daughter Mary, someone I hadn’t seen in eight months. She didn’t notice me and so I called her name as she started walking away. When she heard her name being called she whipped around to see who was talking to her. When she saw it was me, she immediately stopped and began yelling and screaming.
"Don’t come any closer or I’ll call the police. Get away from me. Leave me alone."
"Mary, I just want to talk to you," I replied in a calm voice. "I haven't seen you in months and I thought it would be good for us to talk. That's all." I took a few steps closer thinking this might help. It didn't.
"Don’t come any closer," she yelled again. "I don’t want anything to do with you anymore. I don’t ever want to see you again. I hate you."
"Why are you saying that Mary?" I replied. "Why are you saying you hate me? I don’t understand this. You’re my daughter and I miss you like crazy and I just want to see you and talk to you. I honestly don’t know what I did to make you act this way. Won’t you at least tell me what I did?"
"I think you know what you did," she replied.
"No, I really don’t know," I answered thinking she might want to take this opportunity to clear it up. She didn’t.
"We used to be so close, you and me, Mary," I continued, "and whatever this is is really bad. I don’t know what happened to us. Can’t we at least talk about it for a few minutes? I think we can straighten it out if we do."
"No way," she yelled more emphatically than ever. "I don’t ever want to see you again. You’re not my father anymore. I don’t want anything to do with you. If you come any closer I’ll call the police. I really well. I’m calling them right now."
"Don’t do that Mary."
"Then get away."
I backed up and so did she, and even though we were a long ways apart, it seemed that even from that distance, I could she was crying. And I swear that underneath her bluster and gruff exterior I could hear the pain of a child who has had her life turned upside down and been left confused, alone, and stranded from a life she only recently had with a father she loved. And I heard fear in that small voice of hers as well — fear of the insanity that has now become her life and of the unrealistic choices she'd being forced to make and the unrealistic and unimaginable consequences she'll have to live with no matter which make choice she makes.
Like any alienated child she's being forced to hate someone she loves for reasons she doesn't understand. She's being made to choose between her mother and her father — one or the other — but not both. Both is not an option. And she has to align herself with one of those sides, and distance herself from the other, also for reasons she doesn't understand. And the consequences of making that choice are are making her feel crazy because she doesn't know how to do this and she doesn't want to know. She just wants it to stop.
But that's not an option either.
And so she ends up doing what any child in her position would do — she chooses the path of least resistance, the one with the least amount of pain. She chooses to let her father go and abandon him because it's easier that way, because he won't threaten or hurt or withhold love. And even though there's a part of her, however deeply buried,
that still knows this to be true about him, another part of her has to walk away from him.
And that's exactly what she was doing that day out there in the parking lot — walking away from me. And it's why I sensed so much pain and sadness in her voice and why I felt so sorry for her.
But I was in pain too, watching my little girl act this way around me, seeing this daughter of mine — a child who always loved me more than anything and would often say this very thing to me — changed so severely that I barely recognized her. It was impossible to comprehend. It was killing me.
But even as hard as this was for me, I still felt incredible compassion for her and the position she’s being put in, and all of it was now starting to seem like a bad dream I could only hope to wake up from.
But this was no dream. This was real and happening right now out here in this parking lot and there was nothing I could do about it except stand there in that parking lot and watch Mary walk away from me — a horror and a heartbreak like none other.
By this time a small crowd had gathered around us naturally concerned about this young girl and probably fearful of me, parents stopped in their tracks, holding their child's hands and positioning themselves between their child in me as a shield I'd seen this before, maybe not to this degree, but the same body language from people who didn't know anything about me and shouldn't fear me but who had probably been told untrue things about me: friends, teachers, therapists, doctors, etc. It's unnerving, even debilitating and yet all-too-common when you're on the receiving end of a campaign of denigration — when you're a targeted parent. It tears you down from the inside and makes you doubt yourself almost as much as the people around me were probably doubting me at that moment.
I knew there was no point to try to explain it to any of the onlookers, but I gave it a shot anyhow. "This isn't what you think. I don't know what's wrong with her. I didn't do anything to her. Someone is making her do this…" I droned on to anyone willing to listen, but I doubt anyone believed me. I probably wouldn't have believed me either. But I also didn't care much at that point.
I got on my bike and headed home holding back tears, hurt and confused. After a few blocks I pulled over to collect myself and try to make sense of what I had just witnessed. I turned around to look back, and they're off in the distance was little Mary walking alone. Always alone it seemed she was. I stood there watching her for a while until I realized I was slipping into an even deeper depression about the finality of it all and the reality of knowing our relationship was over and there was nothing more I could do.
And then I realized something else — that for the first time in our lives I couldn't fix something for her, which, as it was turning out to be, was probably the last time I would see her. We were now strangers.
