My darling girl,

I don’t know how to begin this without sounding like the same disappointing old drunk I have been for you most of my life. Maybe that is the truth of me in the end. A man who always found a way to leave things too late. Too late to stop drinking. Too late to fix his marriage. Too late to be the father you deserves, tenfold. Too late to say the words sitting in my beaten chest year after year until they became something like wounds.

I have carried words inside me that should have been given to you a long time ago. Apologies. Explanations. Love. Shame. Things I should have said at our kitchen table, in the car, on your birthday, after arguments, before you stopped waiting for me to become different. Better. Or just not increasingly bad. Instead I swallowed those words. Or drank them down. Or let silence do the least amount damage for me.

I know I disappointed you. I disappointed your mother too. I was not the man either of you deserved, and the worst of it is that I knew it. I saw your mother become tired in a way that sleep could not fix. I saw you become careful around me. I saw the way both of you learned to expect less because expecting more from me only hurt.

I was there enough to be remembered, but not enough to be relied on. That may be the cruelest kind of absence. I know that now as sit here alone.

The divorce did not just end a marriage. It broke something in you too, and I never properly faced that. I let your mother carry the explanations. I let you carry the confusion. I let myself become the man who had another life, other children, other rooms to walk into, while you were left trying to understand why your father could make a new family but could not properly show up for the first one.

There is no decent answer to that. Only shame.

I drank because I was weak around myself. Because drink made it easier not to feel the full weight of what I was doing. Because sober, I had to hear the quiet. I had to remember your face. I had to know I was becoming someone smaller than the man I pretended to be.

And money. God, the money. I know I used it like a poor apology. A cheque instead of a conversation. Help with something practical instead of the courage to say, “I abandoned you, and I am sorry.” I think part of me hoped that if I left you enough, gave you enough, paid for enough. As if it might go towards being good about me in the end.

But it wont.

Money cannot sit beside a little girl wondering why her father does not come. It cannot undo the years where you needed love and got distance, tension and rows. It cannot walk back into your childhood and make you feel like the very special child you were.. It cannot make your mother less lonely. It cannot turn an old drunk into a good father after the fact.

A disappointment. A coward. A man who loved his daughter and still failed to make her feel loved. That is the part I cannot hide.

I did love you. I love you still, I always will. But I know love that cannot be felt does not help a child much. Love trapped inside a damaged man becomes almost useless if it never reaches the people who need it. And mine did not reach you enough. I know that now, when knowing it cannot give you back what you lost.

You do not owe me forgiveness because I am old. You do not owe me comfort because I am frail. If all this letter does is finally tell the truth, then let it tell the truth properly: you were never hard to love. I was hard to reach. I was hard to trust. I was hard to be close to. And you should never have had to spend your life wondering what was wrong with you because your father could not face what was wrong in himself.

I am sorry, my girl. Not the kind of sorry that asks for anything back. Not even acceptance of my apology.

Just sad and sorry.

Your dad