My Father Wound Is the Size of a Melon

I’d bricked up the ache I had felt from my father’s lack of love or concern for me, a long time ago. I drank the pain away and morphed it into a sexy, vivacious, and fun-loving party lover. It’s true, I did lose days to heartache and hangovers, but that’s Yin and Yang, right?

I had a spiritual and faith-filled side too, so I was okay — I thought — but lived too often in the dark places of my mind, and my closed curtained bedroom. Which one was I? Happy or sad? It depended on which part of me was feeling scared or which part of me was feeling I was enough that day.

I fell for the wrong men: the unreachable, the guys who only gave me breadcrumbs—the emotionally unavailable. Like the saxophone player who used to play big gigs for Boy George, I obsessed over him for two years after spotting him on the old-style Facebook dating site, years back. Something about him ‘spoke’ to me. He felt the ‘one’.

I was sort of on and off with someone else at the time. Maybe I was the emotionally unavailable one?

After two years of sending ‘uninterested but gorgeous saxophone player’ mostly one-sided messages here and there, he finally came down from London to stay with me for the weekend. It was only because I’d spotted an Ad for a gig that his well-known musician friend was playing, here in Hove, and Sax Man had needed a place to stay.

I couldn’t believe I was going to meet him! Later, at the club, I stormed out, struggling to run at speed in my cobalt blue high heels; he’d clearly (and obviously) not been interested in me. And of course, when he realised what was happening, he chased me up the road, knowing it would be a pain to get back up to London at silly o’clock. And I let him overstay his welcome.

That was March 2013. I’m not the same woman, and don’t even recognise her or the versions that followed, even since that decade. I’ve healed so much. Understanding my co-dependency and coping mechanisms after therapy and sharing so much of my ‘stuff’ through publishing has been not only liberating, but life-changing too.

I’ve little by little organically found myself to be in a new place in which my estranged parents no longer mentally encroach on my peace, especially after instilling no-contact boundaries for my mother. And my father, well, he’s been long gone. With a ‘new’ family and their adult children and young grandchildren, I don’t exist to him. And I don’t cry about him anymore, not like I used to, and often, when I was twenty and lost.

This changed in the early hours of last night. I’d woken around 4 am after dreaming about him and his family; they were squeezed together, all four of them — two parents and their two offspring, huddled like a four-pack. I remember reflecting on the dream as I woke; I wasn’t moved and recall feeling nonchalant as I turned and walked away from them.

I am sure, as all dreams go, it would have had to mean something to my subconscious mind; maybe because I’d thought about him a couple of weeks back as he reached a milestone birthday. I’d wondered how old he would live to, never having known him as an elderly man.

And the day before his birthday, I came across a 10cc 1972 track, ‘Donna’, sung in falsetto by Lol Creme; Creme had reminded me of my dad back when I was a child. I felt a shift in my heart as the uncanny resemblance triggered a memory of my then — beautiful, ebony black, long-haired, twenty-something father. It only flashed through my soul for a moment, but hot tears sprang up, and something painful, deep within came up and then dissolved, and I felt immediate relief.

After briefly thinking about the dream, I nestled my head comfortably into my pillow to try and get some more sleep; thoughts about my current financial and work difficulties were my only contemplations, as I’ve battled for some time to keep the faith that doors will open soon after a long, barren year.

I began to fall into a layer of sleep, drifting further down into the doorway of REM and abruptly lurched back into consciousness after being startled by a palatable gaping wound in the form and size of a melon. It hovered above my stomach, although in my mind’s eye, supernaturally tangible. It stayed there, apparent, as if a psychic veil had been pulled back. This divine visible epiphany had pierced my subconscious and given birth to this huge symbolic affliction out of the fine leaf of sleep.

My mind tried to work hard to comprehend what was taking place, and I knew without a doubt through a sixth sense that it was the emotional wounds caused by my father. A surreal, symbolic message I had never witnessed or experienced in my life. The more I looked at this huge, round object, the more pain I felt.

I focused again, and the ache was unimaginable; it felt as painful as placing my hand in an inferno and having to quickly remove it because of the searing heat. Muffled cries left my lips as tears forced themselves up. The emotional and spiritual injury was uncomfortably intense; I couldn’t look anymore, it was unbearable.

“Did I wake you early this morning?” I’d asked my partner later today. I had felt like I had been crying out pretty loudly.

It took me until my lunchtime gym session to feel myself again; I’d woken emotionally discombobulated, and even though I’ve been privy to many supernatural occurrences throughout my life, this one knocked me for six. As the day has gone on into the evening, I know I want to consciously process what I saw and acknowledge the origins of that deep agony I’d felt early this morning.

Recently, through a fortunate meeting, I was signposted to go back and pick up my life coaching. I felt excited and inspired. Since the conversation, I’ve played around with my 2021 course material and looked over the work I had carried out with the few coaching clients I had already worked with. It’s been so minor, and I’ve been struggling to know my worth and charge clients, ‘How can I coach others when my life is how it is right now?’

This epiphany has come at the time I needed to see what my massive block is, and how this block stemmed from never been seen or valued by my father.

***

A week after publishing this piece, I learned my father passed away; just two mornings after my supernatural epiphany: looking back, I imagine it was a divine message to warn me. The pain from my grief was unimaginable, yet I was able to heal through so many epiphanies that emerged through my grief, which revealed the rotten roots at the core of my lack of self-belief. Part of me, although sad, regretful and empty… feels a little more liberated. The clarification of why I had been on self-destruct for decades helped me love myself more. 

I had just needed my dad to notice me.

"He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds." - Psalm 147:3

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