Maybe “broken” isn’t the only way to describe girls with an absentee parent.
I come from a “broken” home. As in, my biological father left when I was very small, my siblings and I don’t share the same two parents, and people look at me funny when they find out that the man who is married to my mom is not the same man who fathered me.
By this point in the autobiography of a girl with the same story, society has already made a few assumptions about her. They suppose, at this point, that she has a standard distrust of men. They suppose that she and her stepdad don’t get along because “he won’t ever be daddy.” They suppose that she reads her boyfriend’s text messages while he’s away in the bathroom because she’s afraid he’s going to cheat on her. In other words, they’ve diagnosed her with a fatal case of the Daddy Issues before she can even tell the story of how she got her middle name.
She will never be able to get upset without someone assuming it’s just because she didn’t have her biological father in her life. She will never be able to enjoy being single without at least one person figuring that she just has a lack of commitment brought on by an inherent set of trust issues that a child seems to inherit after a divorce. People will assume that her mild irritation is because of a distrust in the male subspecies, and not just because she wants a taco and no number of father figures in her life will curb that craving.
Society seems to tell girls that unless they had a paternal influence in their lives, they aren’t capable of the full spectrum of human thought and emotion. I take issue with that. After the disappearance of my father, I was raised by a strong, independent woman who was trying to focus on bringing up a decent human being while working full time in a world run by men. She then married a great man who raised me as his own.
Yet despite all of that, it doesn’t seem to matter. According to society, unless I can build a time machine and rectify the situation between my parents, I will never be whole again. Unless I can pull a Parent Trap and convince my mom to leave her perfectly happy life to hitch her wagon to my biological father’s again, I will never be able to trust a man. Until I can find a new set of biological parents who are able to stay together to raise me from the womb, I will forever be labeled a distrusting bitch.
So I guess I’ve got a case of the Daddy Issues. And you know what, Society? I seem to be doing just fine.