My Father was an Alcoholic, and the Scars Remain (Wear Your Voice Mag)

“I was born of violence and dissonance; it was not love that made me.” –1976

My father didn’t come to the hospital to visit when I was born.

It’s not as though he had anything better to do; he had probably been drinking the night before, and he’d probably been drinking his breakfast when they told him that I’d made a less-than-triumphant entrance into the world. (I was a forceps baby, and I had to be yanked out of my mum; it’s almost as though I knew what was waiting for me on the outside, and like a clinging limpet, I simply didn’t want to let go.) He just decided not to bother to come and see me because I was a girl. Despite what science says, it was my mum’s fault that I was a girl, of course. Everything was.

He first held me when I was three months old. I don’t remember anything about that meeting, but there’s a lot about my father that I do remember.

Read the rest here.