I thought of my childhood bedroom, just a few rooms away: the daisy-patterned wallpaper, the little bookshelf with the books I had escaped into as a child, the shelves that were still home to rows of stuffed animals. When I was young, after my mother had tucked me in at night, I would wish so hard for my father to come in afterward, say good night, tell me he loved me—wish so hard that I imagined he could read my mind. At times I whispered into the dark—tuck me in, touch my hair, touch my cheek, tell me you love me—and imagined the wisps of my words traveling through my bedroom and underneath the door and down the hallway and into the living room and right into my father’s ears. Why didn’t he love me? I wanted to ask Freud.

I think your father did love you, he would say. I think he does love you. But it was not in the way that you needed. And perhaps this is the point: not why he couldn’t connect with you, but that he couldn’t connect with you. Perhaps the central acceptance you can make is that you will never fully know—never fully understand—your father. And he will never fully understand you.

Was that possible—that I would never know why? That I wouldn’t know for sure that my father had cheated on my mother, or that he was gay, or that he wanted me and this made him terrified? Why he parted his hair just so. Why he didn’t like to be touched. Sit next to Daddy. Why he spanked me by the sink, or why he couldn’t remember. Why he never came to tuck me in, why he didn’t want me to put my head on his shoulder, let alone make a sandwich with his. I would only understand that he struggled—he wouldn’t act this way if he didn’t; he wouldn’t have become a therapist, either. Neither of them would have. I would understand that, and that I couldn’t get what I needed. It may have been what another child needed, but not me. And instead of shifting my need, my love, someplace else, I’d internalized it all. Of course I had. My parents had become a part of me. And I had been attacking them—the them inside of me: so I had been attacking myself. A painful solution, but one that meant I hadn’t had to accept what they could not give me; I hadn’t had to move on; I hadn’t needed to let go.

But I want to let go, I would tell Freud if he were here.

Do you? he would say.

I did, but I didn’t.

By taking flight into the ego, he would tell me, love escapes extinction…

Again I imagined his palms on the crown of my head.