I’ve spent the week combing through old rehab letters, emails, and screenshots, looking for a chain of messages that rewrote me as the villain.
They refuse to surface. I know they exist—letter #4, rant.docx replies to the worst of them line by line. But the cloud or folder containing them is lost. Proof, gone; bruise, intact.
What stays vivid is the storyline those messages pressed into my skin: You’re selfish. You’re the reason he collapses. This script played on a loop inside my head for so long that even I started to believe it. Shit, it’s the very Lie forming the backbone of my memoir. What I’m trying to overcome.
I keep asking the obvious question—what crime can a child commit so heinous it earns her lifelong blame?—and still come up empty. The distance of a decade lets me frame it differently: sometimes a family under pressure appoints a scapegoat. It’s tidy. Easier. One person absorbs the blame so the rest of the system can keep humming. Still, being the lightning rod hurts like wildfire.
I was six when the new partner arrived. Any sass I threw her way was mere starter-kit hostility: rolled eyes, the occasional slammed door. Nothing that should warrant decades of revisionist history. Yet her lies grew legs, sprinted faster than I could, and crossed the finish line first.
Even now, people who should know better recall the “alternative facts” version—one where I endangered recovery, chased money I never asked for, shattered peace. Reality? I once deleted more than six hundred words of angry truth so my dad could focus on getting well, while my accuser phoned him with her fake script before his withdrawal shakes had even stopped.
That contrast still stings.
Mostly because my love was costly and quiet, the kind that stitches up the holes other people rip. My love was protective. Mine meant holding back the truth to keep Dad from worry, even when it shredded me to stay silent.
Her love was cheap. She took her lies to his sickbed, making everything more stressful. Her story was loud and outrageous—easier to quote. And that’s exactly what Dad did in his first reply back to me; he quoted her story, asked if I could just be a little kinder please. His entire letter was about her, full of worry, stress, and concern. All the care I’d taken to keep him safe from the truth, prioritizing his recovery, went right out the window.
So I’ve been sitting here with that gap, wondering: Why? Why did you do it?
For so long, I let my silence testify. A lie needs oxygen to live, after all. But my silence left room for her accusations to roar, and her chimera’s breath burned me to my core. That’s the heartbreak I still carry: my love was unguarded, almost childlike in its purity, and yet I was always cast as the villain. Women around Dad projected their own obsession with money onto me, and I carried that shame as if it were mine to hold. It wasn’t.
The hardest part of this chapter to write was the end: realizing how I deleted the truth to shield Dad. And how my sacrifice meant nothing.
I wrote him letter after letter from the heart, never once dragging her name into it. And when I finally did write everything down—her erratic texts, her insults, the way she tore at us, blamed us—I deleted 656 words of it. Refused to send it.
I thought I was protecting him while he was trying to heal. I didn’t consider the damage I was doing to myself.
Closing Part Two of the memoir with that scene left me hollow. It’s not a victory. It’s a daughter holding her tongue, protecting her dad while being painted as “the problem,” like always. And the cruelest part is that it worked. I was silenced. My letters went out scrubbed clean.
Part Two of jab doesn’t end with resolution—it ends with a silence that cost me dearly. But no more. Part Three is the reckoning. I just wish Dad were here to read it.
inspo: reviewing the rehab letters I wrote Dad in 2015 // reading the unsent portion of letter 4 // staring at the one hostile text I finally sent back // rereading his “be kinder to her” letter on loop, feeling that familiar pit in my stomach at being so misunderstood // memoir musings
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This is a beautiful and brutal end to this portion of the memoir. Amazing and riveting writing – and so honest and raw that I feel the pain.
Just an aside: I hope I never meet this horrible woman in a dark alley.
Thank you for your steadfast support. ❤️ I wish I could just talk to her—if not face-to-face, maybe over the phone or by email or even snail mail.
It feels like I’ve conflated her with my dad in some ways; since he’s gone things remain forever unresolved, and I can’t fix It or get to the rotten root of It. I can guess at It on my own but that’s all I can do—educated guesswork. But she’s still here so it’s possible to try with her. We could try to work things out or at least try to get a better understanding of the other person.