Fatherless Behavior

My apologies for my dad's tragic death when I was a child.

I was a stripper for much of my life, which in turn makes about sixty percent of y’all hate me.

“Fatherless behavior,” you comment on my essays.

“You should have died for what you did.”

“Most sluts are fatherless.”

A lovely comment on one of my works of art.

You got me, Ken. I am fatherless. I became fatherless when I was sixteen.

The year was 1998. I had been at a sleepover at my best friend’s house, a neighbor girl with whom I shared many childish joys. We’d been up late the night before watching Saved By The Bell and painting our nails with rubber polish, the kind meant to peel off. Cosmetics for children. Her mother was mad that we’d eaten all the Fudge Rounds. My most pressing concern that morning was whether that rubber polish would peel off in the swimming pool while I babysat my little cousin later that day.

That changed when I arrived home.

My mother greeted me at the door, said “your father has leukemia,” sank to her knees, and never got up again in her life.

Three weeks later, he was dead.

Dead.

We thought he had the flu. It wasn’t the flu.

Dead.

That happened nearly thirty years ago, and yet, last night, as I listened to an audiobook on my drive home, the fictional teenage narrator describes her fictional mother dying of cancer, and suddenly I’m sobbing and shouting, “no, no, no.”

I had to pull over at a gas station.

No, Daddy. Please don’t go. I will miss you all of my life.

I have, indeed, missed you—all of my life. I weep for you now, in this very moment.

Some ghosts come to haunt, and never leave.

My father died suddenly when I was a child. My mother went insane. She was only forty-three. I am now forty-three, and every single day of my life is marked by the gnawing fear that it’s time for my husband to die now. I feel his body for lumps. He doesn’t know that I do that.

I entered our home last night as if I had not just been bitterly sobbing in the parking lot of a QT, begging my long-dead father not to leave me. He doesn’t know I do that, either.

I hide my pain. My stupid pain. No one wants my pain. They want my smiles, my beauty, my yesses forevermore. The world taught me that, long ago.

Yes, I became a stripper when I was eighteen. Yes, I even engaged in teenage sexual experimentation before that, an offense which I tenderly recount in this essay, an offense which some of my commentators thought warranted cute sentiments like “you should have died that day" and “you’re an attention-seeking whore.”

Thanks, y’all are great.

You’ll tell me to ignore the trolls, low-key blaming me for “letting them get to me,” when in fact I am subject to a volume and intensity of cruelty on the internet that would make most normal people weep. My soul is more calloused than most. I am not sensitive nor weak.

Why do people talk awful to me on the internet? Me! An official Nice Person who smiles at you lonely hearts at the grocery store! Me! A person that you would probably really like, if you met me!

Because they perceive me as a slut, and people hate sluts.

I would wager that there is no more hate-able category of woman in existence—though I could be wrong, because sheesh, a lot of y’all seem to really hate women!

When people treat me cruelly online, do you know what they often say?

The charge they level against me?

“Fatherless.”

Fatherless. This is the crime of bad women. We have failed because our fathers abandoned us.

Fatherless:

Me, at sixteen, delivering the eulogy at my father’s funeral. The written text of that eulogy exists somewhere. I hope to never find it. To so much as lay eyes on the handwritten document would crush me. Daddy, I miss you. I have spent my whole life missing you.

Fatherless:

My mother, age of seven. Her handsome father, whom she worshipped, fell in love with another woman and started another family. My grandmother dragged my mother, then an elementary school child, to the store where that other woman worked and told this lady, “you have destroyed my family.” My mother continues to cry for her father. She is in her seventies. He left her over sixty years ago. His shadow stretched not only across her life, but also my own. Holidays were always dark with the energy of his absence.

Fatherless:

My cousin, like a sister to me, one of the greatest loves of my life, sitting on the front stairs waiting for her “real dad” to come pick her up. He showed up in a red sports car with a stuffed animal, took her to lunch, and brought her back to me. She saw him rarely. For her entire adult life, she spoke scornfully of this man who did not participate in her life. Yet, when he was dying alone, he reached out to her. When she packed up his house after he died, she found many photos of herself. She was wrecked by this death, by this father she thought she hated, this man she never got to have.

We were innocent. We wanted our fathers. They did not, or could not, want us back.

Fatherless:

An epithet you sling at a woman like me, suggesting that I must have lacked male guidance and male love in order to “turn out like this.”

My father loved me at least as much as yours loved you, and maybe more.

Did the course of my life—my journey into sex work, my youthful (mild) promiscuity—result due to my “fatherless” status?

Sure, I’d say suddenly losing both parents as a teen girl—one to death, and one to grief-stricken insanity—might open a gal up to some dark roads.

I was fatherless. I was motherless. No one cared about me. I was a shadow in my own life. One person showed a great amount of interest in me: a grown man who was also fatherless. He leveraged his dead dad as a means to seduce me. Less than a year later, he beat me so badly that I was hospitalized, a crime for which he received a whopping six weeks in jail.

Haters will say my story merely proves their point: my whorish life has been, in fact, fatherless behavior.

I would counter with: I’d say it’s worse behavior to shame and impugn an individual for surviving a tragedy in the only way they knew how.

I was a vulnerable young woman. Men preyed upon me. I wanted love. I thought their predation was love.

Yes, I was a stripper. Yes, I fucked a few men. A few women, too.

I also:

Earned a PhD. Taught at multiple universities. Published scholarly essays. Published a memoir. Built a six-figure business. Bought a home. Have successfully been married to one man for nearly sixteen years. Produced two beautiful sons. Taken those sons to the beach. Breastfed them until they weaned themselves. Sacrificed my professional life to be present for these children. If you saw me in the grocery store, smiling at you across the aisle, you’d see me there with my two-year-old in the cart, and you’d think, “a nice mom.”

You would not see me and think “slut.”

I am a fairly normal human. I have made human mistakes and been on human adventures. At no time in my sexual history nor my sex work history did I hurt anyone, though I myself was occasionally hurt. Why does my sexuality enrage you?

Here I am, mere weeks before my father’s diagnosis, in the last photo he would ever take of me.

That kid right there? That complete and total child, smiling sweetly in a prom dress as her daddy takes her photo, dying unbeknownst yet to us all?

That’s the person you laugh at, the child you impugn, when you call me “fatherless.”

—L.B., March 2025