Walking me down the aisle is a privilege my dad hasn’t earned

‘Why are you texting me, why are you calling me baby girl? How did you even get my number? I do not know you.’

As a teenager, those questions swirled in my head as I stared at my father’s rare texts to me.

Those messages were so jarring.

Not only was it always far too little, way too late, but it was a stinging reminder of everything a father and daughter should be to each other that we are not.

I haven’t seen my father, let’s call him Jack, since I was six years old.

That was the only time I remember him coming to visit me after he and my mum divorced when I was two. I remember very few things about Jack from that visit – mostly that he was silly, and he made me laugh, and I remember his short coarse hair and dark copper skin.

I do know I was excited to see him. We went for dinner and he gave me a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll, even though my mother had already asked him to please consider diversifying his gifts and find dolls that looked a bit more like me.

She was worried that having too many Caucasian toys with light hair and bright eyes in the house would warp my beauty standards and convince me there was only one kind of pretty; a kind that I would never be.

But I didn’t care about the doll. I cared about seeing him. Even as a six-year-old, I hoped this visit would be the start of a change; of a long string of visits without end.

Instead, I experienced the opposite.

I would be lucky to get a phone call or email maybe once every few months, and at my mother’s insistence. Sometimes texts would be sent seemingly at random, but a lot of the time it was on the odd special occasion, like a birthday or Easter.

And considering this would often be part of a months – if not years – long cycle of ghosting, reaching out and then ghosting again, his messages were always weirdly over-familiar.

Now, 24 years after the last time I saw Jack, I’m looking forward to my wedding this summer. My fiancé and I have had a lot of fun planning it all; we’ve talked excitedly about every single aspect of how we want the day to go, from the favours to the after-party.

But one thing we didn’t need to talk about was Jack, because inviting my biological father was never even a question. After not having him in my life in any meaningful way since I was two, it just feels correct. It would be so much weirder to invite him – stranger to me that he is.  

In fact, nobody has asked me why he’s not coming, or even said his name to me – not once. Because everyone who knows me well enough to be aware of the fact that he’s not going to attend also knows that he’s never really been in my life in any meaningful way, and he deserves an invite about as much as the last stranger I sat next to on the bus does.

We were living in the US at the time of Jack’s one and only visit. He was based a couple of states away from us, so I could sympathise with him not visiting much if he was worried about money or couldn’t get time off work.

But since he also couldn’t seem to call or even email consistently, and he was never so hard-up for cash or time that he couldn’t afford to do either of those things on a regular basis for his own child, my sympathy had limits.

If he’d somehow become mentally or physically unwell since the divorce, too unwell to pick up a phone for months and years on end, nobody told my mum or me about it. Therefore, the only conclusion left to reach was that he just didn’t care enough to try.

It went on like this for years, with the occasional call or birthday e-card (if I was lucky) being the full extent of our relationship.

As I hit my late teens, I started to find his increasingly sporadic reach-outs and subsequent ghosting quite jarring.

It was then I decided to cut him out of my life – and I became a statistic of an estimated one in five families that are impacted by estrangement in some way.

There were so many years when I was open to the idea of forgiving him for not being there; for dropping in and out of my inbox seemingly on a whim – but Jack had so many chances to know me, and he could never be bothered to take them.

I’ve heard a couple people in my circle argue over the years that weddings serve as sort of a reward for parents. In exchange for raising their children into good, well-adjusted adults, they get their own special places of honour and congratulations on the day.

Did you decide not to invite a parent to your wedding? Have your say in the comments belowComment Now

They sit on the top table, they walk their children down the aisle, they get an emotional spin around the dance floor. They get to shake hands, wipe away tears of joy and agree with everyone who says something to the effect of: ‘You must be so proud’. And rightly so.

But my biological father didn’t raise me. He doesn’t even know me.

He doesn’t deserve an invite to my wedding, or to meet my fiancé. He doesn’t deserve to see how happy I’ll be on the dance floor that night, surrounded by people who love me properly, and he’s certainly got nothing to be proud of.

Instead, my mum will be accepting the handshakes, and my stepdad will be walking me down the aisle. They’ll be the ones sitting next to me and my future husband at the top table, reaping the rewards they deserve and enjoying my happiness.

Estrangement isn’t a choice to be taken lightly by any means, but I hope more people in situations like mine can feel able to stop wasting time on people who aren’t worth the effort.

There are always going to be people who don’t deserve the privilege of knowing you. Sometimes, those people just happen to be related to you.

MORE : A divorcee told me she thinks marriages should have a 10-year renewal clause – and I agree

MORE : A Google alert on my phone completely changed the way I raise my children

MORE : My husband refuses to stay at my dad’s because of the sleeping arrangements

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.