My Epiphany

I imagined them telling my grandmother.

My poor grandmother! She would be heartbroken. I started thinking of all the sacrifices she had made. How she had worked and hoped for a different fate for her daughters other than the (abusive) path her life had followed. I thought of my mother and her failed choices in men, her failed marriage and her continued search for ‘her mate’. I then thought of myself and right when I was about to wallow in my self pity, it hit me. I could not believe I had not seen it before. The weight of the revelation pushed the fear out of me. I was no longer afraid, I was puzzled, surprised even. I couldn’t believe this had evaded me for this long. This whole situation really had been in some odd unconscious way, my fault. My fault because I had simply chose what I had seen my grandmother and mother chose throughout my childhood.  It then made sense to me that three generations later, I would be in the same situation as the matriarchs of my family. My grandmother had suffered mercilessly under the reign of my abusive maternal grandfather. He was always absent from the house and when he showed up it was extremely tense and everyone was on pins and needles. His absence in turn led to an absent father figure for my mother. My mother in turn, trying to find that father figure which she never had, chose someone who was older and who she thought would provide the security her father never provided for her.  So, unfortunately, when she met my father…surprise, surprise, he never stuck around long enough for me to even see his face.

 I, two generations later in the absence of a positive father figure made the choice I made. And true to form, I ended up picking someone who, even though did not seem to have violent characteristics towards me in the beginning, ended up treating me the same way my grandmother and mother were treated.  How can it be three generations later and I unconsciously make a choice like this. Time had evolved. Women’s’ place in the world had changed, and so why had my choices in men remain so archaic and consistently the same? To answer that question on a sort of path to self actualization, I decided to interview other women with absentee fathers to find out how it has affected their relationship with men and how they’ve overcome it. Was there really some link between absent fathers and wrong choices in men? Or was it just me? Or my family?