Stop Saying I Have Daddy Issues Just Because I Call Them My Dead Gary Issues

I’d like to send a message to all the men I’ve dated, am currently dating, and who moved out of state after I emotionally ruined them. That message is: One cannot have “daddy issues” when they have no daddy physically present on this planet to give provide them with said issues. When I bring up my dead Gary in casual conversation, I am not “making it weird.” I am living my truth.

Yes, my biological father, Gary, is no longer alive. I do not call him my daddy because labels like these suggest a dominance within the home that establishes more of a Russian doll–inspired social hierarchy rather than a shared existence between intellectually autonomous individuals. He also didn’t want me to call him “Dad” because it would ruin his chances of picking up chicks at the Winn-Dixie when we had to make runs for boxed mac and cheese. He also hit me a lot, and I really hate him. I mean, “hated,” because he is dead.

I do not believe in Father’s Day. I have Dead Gary’s Day, the anniversary of my twin sister and I finding his body tattered to bits because he took a nap in the cornfield, too drunk to hear Uncle Larry riding through on the seed sower. We were traumatized but also relieved. My sister has her fair share of dead Gary issues, too, but she is handling them well as a professional dancer at Tiger Babies, where she takes her clothes off for dudes that are much nicer to use than dead Gary.

I never knew my birth mother, because she didn’t remember our birth and left soon after we were born. Still, her absence wasn’t as damaging as dead Gary’s presence. I got to choose my own mother figure (Becky on Full House, a.k.a. “TV Mommy”). I was stuck with dead Gary.

I’ll never know what it’s like to have experience real male love, thanks to dead Gary. No man will ever fully have my heart, because I do not know how to love them, especially the idiot fuckboys who keep telling me I have “daddy issues.” I hope you all get chopped up by farming machinery so I can watch the crows peck at your severed dick like a loose ear of corn. Just like dead Gary.

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