Fatherhood & attachment

For the Fathers: What to Do When You're the One Who Left

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC · 8 min read

You've typed it and deleted it.

Maybe more than once. Maybe there's a version sitting in a drafts folder from two years ago, and you know roughly what it says, and you know it isn't right, and you couldn't say why.

Or you're not typing anything at all, because you decided a while back that the kindest thing left to do is stay out of the way. She's got a life. Showing up now would be about you and not her. You'd only be doing it to feel better.

That last one deserves a straight answer, so here it is before we go any further. Sometimes it's true. Mostly it isn't. And the way you find out which is not by examining your motives for another six years. It's by looking at what you actually do.

I'm not going to spend this piece convicting you. You've got that covered, you've been running that program a long time, and as far as I can tell it has never once produced a phone call.

So what would?

Shame does a very convincing impression of remorse

Start with two things that are both true at once, because the mind badly wants to collapse them into one.

You are not the villain of this. You were built by somebody too, most likely by a man running his own version of the same thing, and whatever got skipped in him got skipped in you. That's real and it explains a great deal.

And it doesn't settle anything. Explaining is not excusing. A cause is not a permission slip. Knowing where a thing came from never once changed what it cost the person it landed on.

Some of you had genuine obstacles. Distance, courts, a number that changed, work that took you where the work was, a mother with reasons of her own you may never have understood. I'm not here to litigate any of it. I'd only point out that from inside a nine-year-old, obstacles and choices look identical. He didn't have the paperwork. He had a door.

Now the thing that's actually been stopping you.

Guilt is about something you did, and it comes with a task attached. Shame is about what you are, and there's no task in that, so it issues exactly one instruction: hide.

Shame is heavy and serious and it feels like finally facing it. But look at what it produces. It produces a man who is very sorry and has not called in nine years. It's an anesthetic doing a convincing impression of remorse, and it works, mechanically, as an exit. A man who declares himself worthless has just ended the conversation and excused himself from the specific work.

Why "I was a sorry excuse for a father" closes the door

That sentence feels like the biggest thing you could possibly say, and it comes out with your whole chest.

Watch what it does when it lands.

It's enormous and it has no edges, so it hands your child a job. She can agree with you, which makes her cruel, or she can talk you out of it, which makes her your counselor. Either way she's now working. At thirty-four, in a parking lot, doing the same shift she worked at eight: managing your feelings about what you did to her.

That's the difference between an apology that's a delivery and one that's a request.

A delivery is a true thing, accurately named, handed over with nothing attached. A request is anything that needs a response to be complete. Tell me it's okay. Tell me I wasn't that bad. Tell me where we stand. You can dress a request up in a lot of remorse and it stays a request, and she will feel the ask underneath it before she finishes the first paragraph, because reading you was her childhood job and she is extremely good at it.

Here's the test. Write the thing. Then ask yourself what response would make it a success. If any answer comes back other than she received it, you've written a request. Put it away and write it again.

And leave the reasons out. They're true and they're not hers to carry. What she's holding isn't a grudge, it's an injury with a shape to it, and it's worth understanding what a father wound actually is before you put a word in front of her, or you'll write to the wrong thing.

One sentence with a date in it

A man I worked with a few years ago was in his fifties, drove a delivery route, and arrived fifteen minutes early to every appointment for eight months. Genuinely funny, good timing, every third joke at his own expense. His daughter, twenty-nine, had stopped answering about two years before.

He came in with the verdict already written. He was a bum, he was a waste of a father, and he said it warmly, the way you'd read a line off a form you'd filled out many times.

So I stopped taking the verdict as an answer. Every time he reached for it, I asked for something with a date in it. Not a summary. A day. An actual day, with him in it.

Then in February, in the chair he always sat in, he said this: "I told her I'd come to the band thing. She was in seventh grade. It was a Thursday in November, and I picked up a shift instead, and I didn't call her, and I never said one word about it after."

A promise, a date, and what he did with it. And then he did not say the other thing. He didn't say he was a bum. He sat there with it uncovered and looked out the window.

Then: "I'd rather say I was a bad father. That one doesn't hurt like this one does."

No. It doesn't. That's the tell that something real is happening. (Details are composite, as with everyone I describe outside the room.)

The verdict is huge and vague, and a man can carry it around all day in a truck. The specific sentence has edges. A girl in a folding chair with a clarinet. A Thursday. A call that would have taken two minutes.

Specificity is the actual work, and here's why. A general apology says something happened. A specific one says I know what happened, I know when, and I know what it cost you. Your child has been carrying that exact date the entire time. Meeting her at the date is the whole difference between an apology and a press release.

One concrete sentence beats an hour of general regret. Not close.

If you're still in the house

Some of you didn't go anywhere. You were there every night for eighteen years, and there's a distance in that house nobody has ever been able to name, and your kid can't explain it to a single soul, because by every visible measure you were right there.

The same moves apply, and it is not too late.

Attention isn't attunement. Attunement is registering what's going on in another person and reflecting it back accurately enough that they feel it landed. Daniel Siegel calls it feeling felt. It's a skill, not a personality trait, which means it can be learned at fifty-eight by a man nobody ever showed it to once. If you've been told you were around but not there and it never made sense to you, that gap has a name, and it isn't an accusation.

And if there are still kids under your roof, take some real comfort in Edward Tronick's work: what builds a secure kid isn't a father who never misses. It's a father who notices he missed and comes back. Ordinary rupture, ordinary repair, hundreds of times. None of this is sealed, either. Attachment describes tendencies, not verdicts.

What actually helps

Write the specific sentence for yourself first, and don't send it. One event. One date. What you did, and what it likely cost. Then find out whether you can stay in the room with it for eight seconds without reaching for the verdict. That's the rep.
If you do send something, send a delivery. Short. Named. No reasons, no history, no ask. Close a door instead of opening one, in writing: you don't owe me an answer. Then mean it, which is the hard part and the entire point.
Do the part nobody claps for. The birthday remembered every year with no reply coming. Knowing the names of her kids without asking her for them. Not turning up at a door. Reliability performed for an audience of zero is the only evidence that has ever counted here.
Get another person in the room with you. A counselor, a pastor, one honest friend. Shame does not survive well in company. It does its best work on a man alone in a vehicle. If it's gone somewhere darker than that, or you're drinking on it, that's a medical conversation and not a character one, and it's worth taking to a professional this month.

She may never answer

I'm not going to lie to you about the odds, and you'd know if I did.

She may never answer. She may answer once and go quiet again, which will be worse. She may answer in eleven years, on a Tuesday, about nothing. What she decides about access is hers, and it isn't a verdict on your soul, and it isn't a door you get to knock on until it opens.

Which leaves the part that has nothing to do with her, and it's larger than it sounds.

Repair takes exactly one participant. You can stop running the play, and the beneficiary might be a grandchild, or a nephew, or some kid at work who reminds you of somebody.

You came here looking for the sentence that fixes it. There isn't one. There's a Thursday in November, and there's you, knowing exactly what happened on it and not looking away.

That's the smallest piece of this work. It's also all of it.

Rolling Stones, Broken Bonds: Paternal Absence, Relational Trauma, and the Generational Search for Repair is available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook. It's written for the children who waited, for the adults still waiting without knowing it, and for the fathers ready to stop running.