“That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father's flaws, constantly updating the tally as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified I thought the strangling guilt would release me, and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of ones own retchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.
I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on my own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old greviences, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all.
I learned to accept my decision for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.
When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I percieved him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me towering, indignant, I could not remember how when I was young his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us.
But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised but he is the father who raised her.”