daddy’s issue

Yesterday, I was listening to Oxmo Puccino, and he said he hopes his daughter never has “daddy issues.” For him, that comes from fathers who never said I love you, who weren’t really there—women who grow up screaming to be held while simultaneously rejecting the masculine.

Well… I do have daddy issues! LOL. I’ve healed a lot around them, but they’re still part of my story—and I’m choosing to take the best from it.

I could focus on everything I didn’t get: how he abandoned us, disowned us, treated us like a burden, never said I love you, blamed us for my mother leaving… The list could go on and on.

Or—I can look at what he did give me.

He gave me his sharpness of mind. His intolerance for superficiality. He tried to teach me to be less emotional—he always said, “Be a duck, let things roll off you like water on feathers.” (Still working on that!) He introduced me to incredible restaurants, chefs, museums, exhibitions—things I found boring back then but appreciate so much now.

My father didn’t give me the love or safety I longed for. He gave me absence. But he also gave me a brain that questions everything. He taught me to read, to think, to challenge society’s narratives, to create my own perception. He taught me not to trust easily—maybe too well, because now I trust no one, and I love too much. I make sure the people I love feel safe. I say “I love you” all the time—because that’s what the little girl in me wanted. And as an adult, I built the world she needed.

It’s never too late to create the world you wish you had.

And when I look at his story, I understand him more. He was a post-war baby. His father recognized him before his mother did. He didn’t meet his father until he was 27, in Patagonia—because he went looking for him. He grew up suffering, shamed as “the bastard” in the Limoges of the 1950s. He rejected his Prussian heritage. And still, he managed to believe in love. I saw him love my mother more than anything—even while carrying his own patterns.

That’s why I became a therapist. I wanted to understand him—and understand where I come from.

Whether we like it or not, we are our parents, our lineage. And we get to choose: turn their patterns into strength, or let them become our weakness.

With love,
Marine Sélénée