This is a hard letter to write, Daddy. First, I want to say – separate from being your daughter and the hurt your lie caused our family – how proud I am that you are finally out and living the life you wanted to have – that you should have had. I am so sad to think that you felt you had to hide such a big part of yourself for so long.
I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up as you did, in a community where homosexuality was taboo and illegal. How can you help who you are inside? No wonder you chose to hide it, not knowing who you could trust or where you could gain support.
As you said to me, things were so different back then. I hope that living with your partner is everything you hoped it would be, that after hiding a different relationship for so long, you feel free to be yourself. I hope that you have now found the happiness you were denied for so long, because you deserve it.
Having said all that, I am so angry and so sad that your lies tore our family apart. Was all the love and caring a charade? Was the daddy I adored just a facade?
Since you went off to live this new life, it seems that key parts of your old life have just been left behind. And I’m sorry if I contributed to this in ways that were accidental, but you should know that it was the shock, the deceit and the duplicity that hurt – not your choice of partner. In fact, had you chosen a woman, I would have found it so much harder to ever forgive the lies you fed us for so long.
I feel so much sadness for my mother, who has had her plans for her retirement years utterly shattered. Yet right up until the moment you were caught, you continued to plan for this phase in your lives together.
I know you have said you were trying to protect us, that there is no good time to reveal an affair, especially one as shattering as yours, which fractured everything you had in your married life. But can’t you see how this only made it worse? You went off with your new partner, leaving us to pick up the pieces with Mum.
Our relationship has been irrevocably changed by the events of recent years, over your inability to accept that your affair was hurtful, that the deceit was hurtful and the act you played – that of being the family man – was so upsetting in its destruction. I can’t see how you could have done anything differently before the revelations, but I would have wished for a different outcome.
I wish we were still close and that I was still that daddy’s girl. I’ll always wonder what I did wrong or what I could have done differently so that you would still love me like you did and not just leave me behind for your new life.
I guess we are both happy now and that is all that matters. But I do still wonder what happened to the dad I loved, and feel sad that he’s never coming back.
With love and regret
