The Father I Lost Too Early

Untangling Love, Helplessness & Generational Pain

I’m seeing my father more clearly now than I ever did when he was alive.
Not because something changed about him, but because I’ve finally changed enough to see beneath the surface.

For years, I carried a version of him shaped by confusion, fear, and the things I witnessed as a child.
But the deeper I look, the more I realise this:

My dad wasn’t the source of the chaos I grew up in — he was the outlet.

What I saw was the end of the chain, not the beginning.

He lived inside a system that slowly dismantled him

He entered a relationship where:

he had no real autonomy
every mistake was stored as evidence
every success was minimised
discipline was forced onto him
his voice was dismissed
his identity slowly dissolved
support was non-existent
isolation became the norm

He lost friends.
He lost work.
He lost his confidence.
He lost the freedom to be himself.

This wasn’t because he was weak.

It’s because he was systematically eroded.

Years of emotional pressure can look like incompetence from the outside.
But from the inside, it’s closer to a form of imprisonment.

His anger wasn’t the anger of a violent man — it was the grief of a trapped one

When you’re emotionally cornered long enough, two things happen:

You shut down, because nothing you do makes things better.
Your frustrations leak out, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

He didn’t have power, so he tried to use volume.
He didn’t have agency, so he tried to use force.
His anger wasn’t him — it was the pressure cooker he lived in.

And in a twisted way, that actually makes the whole thing even sadder.

He was cast as “the bad father” — and he begged not to be

One thing I’ll never forget is him saying:

“Why do I always have to be the one to discipline them?”

That sentence is the quiet truth of our entire family system.

He was given the anger.
She kept the innocence.
He got the blame.
She got the sympathy.
He became the “problem.”
She became the “victim.”

And children internalise that.

I did.

For years.

And only now, with distance and clarity, can I see how deeply unfair it was.

I admire him more now than I did then

He wasn’t perfect.
He made mistakes.
He scared me at times.
He disappointed me at times.

But when I look beneath it all, I see a man who:

loved his children
held onto his values in impossible situations
tried to protect us the only way he knew
endured more than anyone should
stayed because he feared losing us
accepted the villain role rather than abandon his kids
lived with shame that wasn’t his
died earlier than he should have, probably from the weight of it all

That’s not weakness.
That’s heartbreak.

And I understand him now in a way I never could before.

The grief is layered

I’m grieving:

who he was
who he could have been
the life he never got to live
the father he tried to be
the father he wasn’t allowed to be
the childhood that never made sense
the silence he carried
the helplessness he lived in
the relationship we lost long before he died

The grief isn’t clean or simple.

It’s tangled with compassion, sorrow, anger, and understanding.

But for the first time in my life, it feels like mine.
Not inherited, not blurred, not distorted.
Just… mine.

And that feels like a beginning, somehow.

What I’m choosing to carry forward

I’m choosing to carry:

his gentleness,
his curiosity,
his belief in me,
his quiet endurance,
and the love that existed beneath the noise.

And I’m choosing to leave behind the silence, the shame, and the exhaustion that never belonged to him — and definitely don’t belong to me.

This is the start of reclaiming him.

And reclaiming myself.