Every time Brown Eyed Girl plays on the radio, it’s like someone is violently squeezing my lungs between their fists, and I can feel tears prickle my cheeks. I’m immediately reminded of my dad—the man I idolised for most of my life but who I chose to cut off for 12 years.
For a few minutes, I allow myself to remember a happier time, when he spun me around on the dance floor to this song at a family wedding, and stroppy teenage eye rolls turned into an uncontrolled fit of giggles.
I love my dad very much. And, yes, there’s a big part of me that feels like I’m betraying him by writing this article. But few people talk about family estrangement when it’s not a sensational story about a celebrity cutting ties with their famous family. So, as people pick their sides in the Brooklyn Beckham family rift, I know all too well that cutting off a family member is unbelievably hard for all parties involved.
My decision to cut my dad out of my life
Four years after that night on the dance floor, my parents divorced. My father left my mum for a younger woman, who lived in Rome, became a father figure to her two daughters from a previous marriage, and moved to Italy permanently.
Even today, I can’t shake the sense of bewilderment at how our family fractured. I was an only child, so I’d always been daddy’s little girl. When I was younger, I’d leveraged that gravitas to get the dog I always wanted; as a teenager, I would have done anything to make him proud. We shared a love of books—I introduced him to Margaret Atwood, and he gave me his well-thumbed copy of Heart of Darkness. We’d have father-daughter cinema trips, which inevitably involved a jumbo bucket of popcorn and a horror movie.
It’s memories like these that I desperately wanted to preserve when my father left our family home. Divorce is an ugly affair, but it revealed a side to my dad that I’d never seen before and that threatened to destroy our past and future relationship completely. I struggled in the aftermath. My mum arranged for counselling for me, and I ended up on a course of antidepressants, but ultimately, what saved my mental health was the decision to put my relationship with my dad on ice.
That’s not to say that any of this was easy. I desperately missed my dad—the version of him I’d known and loved my whole life. I cried every birthday. I agonised over who would walk me down the aisle if I ever got married. I felt a stab of jealousy, wondering if my dad would drive his girlfriend’s daughter to her friend’s house—then sit in a nearby coffee shop reading until she was ready to leave, like he used to do when I was younger. But by freezing time, I was able to cling to happier memories like a life raft when I needed them, rather than be angry and fearful all the time.
