My Favorite Person Who Was Never There
“For the first four years of my life, I was my father’s little girl. Then one day he was gone. This is the story of what it’s like to spend a lifetime loving someone who wasn’t there.“
Some people grow up with fathers who are always there.
I grew up loving a father who disappeared.
I was four years old when my parents divorced.
Before that, I was a complete daddy’s girl. He carried me everywhere and took me everywhere. We were inseparable.
My father struggled with alcoholism, and sometimes he would disappear for days at a time on drinking binges. But when he came home, we had a ritual.
He would pull up in front of the little brick apartment building where we lived. It was one of those single-level apartment buildings that looked very much like something straight out of 1974—plain, drab, and simple.
He always parked his pickup truck right along the curb next to the narrow sidewalk that led to our front door.
But before he walked toward the building, he would leave the passenger door open and the glove compartment hanging down.
Inside the glove box, waiting for me, would be a roll of Lifesavers candy.
He always opened the package just a little so that my tiny four-year-old fingers could get into it.
When I saw his truck pull up, I would get so excited. I would watch through the window while he got out of the truck and started walking down that narrow sidewalk toward the apartment.
The moment he started walking toward the door, I would burst outside and run toward him as fast as my little legs could carry me.
He was tall, and I was tiny.
As I ran toward him, he would lift one leg, and I would run right between his legs without stopping, heading straight for the truck.
Climbing up into that truck was not easy for a four-year-old.
But I did it every time.
I would scramble up onto the seat, grab the Lifesavers out of the glove box, and slide back down out of the truck onto the ground.
Then I would push the truck door closed as hard as I could with my little hands—usually the one that wasn’t holding the candy.
After that, I would go sit down in the grass right next to the sidewalk.
I always picked the cherry one first.
Cherry was my favorite.
He knew that.
So I would sit there in the grass, sucking on my cherry Lifesaver, completely happy in that moment.
Looking back now, those memories are some of the only positive moments I can remember of my father actually being in my life.
When my parents divorced when I was four years old, everything changed.
Not long after the divorce, my mom met a man who would eventually become my stepfather. He is still in my life today, even now that I’m fifty-five years old.
At the time, my mom was a newly divorced woman trying to raise four children completely on her own in the 1970s.
That wasn’t easy.
Eventually we moved to Anaheim, California. I was about five and a half years old.
Anaheim is where many of the defining moments of my childhood happened.
It’s where I drowned in an apartment complex swimming pool the day before my sixth birthday.
It’s also where I met my best childhood friend, a boy in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy.
But the absence of my father shaped me even more.
After my parents divorced, my father remarried fairly quickly.
Over the years, I tried again and again to reach him. Phone numbers changed. Addresses disappeared. Family members would not tell me where he was.
As a child, I had nightmares that he had died. I would wake up crying and calling his name while my mom comforted me.
Around that same time, I began wetting the bed. I later learned that childhood trauma can cause that, but at the time all I knew was the embarrassment and shame it caused.
It lasted for years.
By the time I was fifteen, I even had to wear diapers at night for a while. It was humiliating, and I tried everything I could to hide it.
When I was about sixteen, I began dating seriously. My relationship with my boyfriend became my whole world, and eventually my mom had had enough.
One day I came home from school and found my bags sitting on the porch. The door was locked.
My mom opened the door just enough to tell me I needed to leave for thirty days and learn what it meant to act like an adult.
So I did.
For a while, I slept wherever my boyfriend happened to be staying—even in a warehouse where his band practiced.
Eventually, I never moved back home.
My relationship with my mom remained strong.
When I was twenty-eight years old, I had three children. I had also gotten sober and had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous for a little over a year.
Life was finally beginning to feel more stable.
One day I decided to try one more time to find my father.
I sat outside on a curb in the sunshine, wrestling with the decision to make that phone call.
I had tried so many times before.
Every time I had gotten my hopes up as a little girl, I had been let down. And every time it hurt a little more.
So I had eventually stopped trying.
That day, sitting on the curb, I made a deal with God.
If my father refused to talk to me this time, I would never try again.
And I meant it.
I picked up the phone.
Then I hung it up.
I picked it up again.
Hung it up again.
This went on for almost thirty minutes.
Because I knew something about myself — when I make a promise, I keep it.
Finally, I dialed the number and let it ring.
My uncle answered.
He told me he had never agreed with the way this whole situation had been handled. Then he said something I never expected.
“Get a pencil and paper.”
He gave me my father’s phone number.
And his address.
I sat there staring at that number for a long time.
Then I dialed.
My stepmother answered.
I calmly told her I was twenty-eight years old, that I had three children, and that I only wanted one thing.
A relationship with my father.
I told her I didn’t want money.
I didn’t want anything from him.
I just wanted to know my dad.
After some angry words, she finally yelled across the room that his daughter was on the phone.
Then the line went silent.
For what felt like forever.
And then I heard a voice.
“Hello?”
It was my father.
I couldn’t speak.
Then he said, “Honey… are you there?”
He called me honey.
After twenty‑four years, the first thing he called me was honey.
I started crying. I still couldn’t talk.
Then I heard him say to someone in the background, “This is my daughter. I have been kept from her for twenty‑four years. I want to talk to her, and I’m going to.”
A door slammed.
He chuckled softly and said, “Well, I guess that answers that question. So honey… tell me about your life.”
We talked for hours.
A couple of years later I finally visited him with my children. We met him in Salt Lake City, squeezed into his pickup truck, and spent four wonderful days together.
He showed us the city, took us for ice cream, and drove us out into the open fields where wild horses ran.
My kids still remember those days with their grandpa.
Later in life my dad’s health declined. We eventually had the difficult conversations about the years we had lost.
He apologized.
Because of my own experience with alcoholism, I understood more than I expected to. And forgiveness came easier than I thought it would.
I didn’t want to spend our remaining time together focused on the past.
Unfortunately, our time was short.
Eventually, he ended up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was living in a nursing facility.
He died there.
Alone.
I didn’t even know he had passed away until three weeks later when Adult Protective Services contacted me.
They told me my father had died in his sleep.
And in a strange way, it felt almost fitting.
Because just like the little four-year-old girl he once left behind…
He left the world alone too.
And even though my father was gone for most of my life, I still carry pieces of him with me.
His stubbornness.
His independence.
And the memory of a little girl running toward a pickup truck with a roll of Lifesavers waiting in the glove box.
For a few moments in my childhood, I knew what it felt like to be my daddy’s little girl.
Sometimes that memory has to be enough.
If parts of this story felt familiar to you, you’re not alone. Life has a way of shaping us through the people who stay and the people who don’t.
If you have a story of your own you’d like to share, you can visit the Share Your Story section of this blog.
Thank you for being here and reading my story.
— Brandee Tidwell
The Moments That Built Me
