I Am the Villain

God knows I’ve had my heart broken. When Mari left me when I was 20, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. Two years later, when Annie fled home to San Rafael after we’d lived together for a couple of weeks, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. Five years later, when Patti declared that she loved me, but was no longer in love with me, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. There are times when I still wonder if I’m completely over that one, and it was a million years ago. But I’m here to tell you that no lover can hope to fracture your heart as your own child can.

I think back to a Friday afternoon in 1999. At exactly the same time she’s become extremely interested in boys, my daughter has comfort-eaten herself into a state of greatly diminished attractiveness to them. We’re sitting side by side in the car I inherited from my mother in the driveway of our home on Pierce Street in Santa Rosa, and my daughter, who’s made a practice of telling me nothing at all about her life in the past several months, can’t help but burst into tears. She reveals that there’s a big dance that night at her high school, and she hasn’t been invited to it. She’s pretty sure she’s the only girl at her high school who’ll miss the dance.

If I could take her pain and endure it for her, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but that’s not an option. I grope instead for a way to give her hope. I point out with the utmost gentleness that she seems to have gained some weight the past few months, and that the boys in her classes would probably would line up to ask her out if she got back in shape. I work out daily at the YMCA around the corner, and invite her to come with me. The look she gives me makes clear that the only part she heard is the one about the boys not being interested in her. I am the villain, the cause of her agony. I feel as though someone’s pulling my heart out without an anesthetic.

We go back a few months farther. Although the main reason Nancy and I have moved all the way up to Santa Rosa (a 100-minute drive from Nancy’s job at the San Francisco Zoo) is to accommodate her, my daughter has effectively stopped having anything to do with us. There’s a dance at her high school (the earlier one, from which I later helped her transfer because she was so miserable) to which everyone comes stag. She doesn’t want me to pick her up at the end because she wants nothing at all to do with me, but her mother apparently decides to stay late at one of the groovy clubs in San Francisco at which she so loves being noticed by much younger men, and my daughter finds herself with no recourse but to phone me for a ride “home.” She doesn’t deign to speak to me as we head back to Pierce Street. She doesn’t speak to Nancy when we arrive.

The next morning, Nancy and I leave a glass of juice and a muffin outside her bedroom door, with a note from me saying I love her. Then we make ourselves scarce so she can leave without having to speak to us. She drinks the juice and eats the muffin. She leaves no note.

This sort of thing is repeated over and over and over again. She’s furious at the world for hurting her, and aims her anger at me. Though her actions very eloquently say, “I hate you,” I continue to adore her, and spend most of the two years between 1999 and 2001 feeling as though I’ve got a knife in my heart.

In 2010, I read some of the writing she’s done for her church newsletter. She speaks of her inability to hold a grudge — against anyone except her dad. She hasn’t spoken to me in eight years, and there is no end in sight.