As I write now I write with a broken heart, or rather a heavy heart. A heart that has been carrying pain for the past months. Pain that has always been there. It was all buried at the back of my mind or rather in my subconscious.

It all emerged when I started my first year in university. I’m an insecure, self-doubting woman who has never had a good relationship with my mother because she left me with granny at the age of three. I’m a broken woman who was dumped by her baby daddy at three months pregnant. Most painfully, I’m a lost woman who never knew her father and is never good at forging lasting relationships.

I come from a small town where everybody knows everyone. I was introduced to a big city where I had to complete my degree. There came a city with tall buildings, diverse people. The environment was all right at the beginning after years of being cooped up in a small town. That did not last long as my world crumbled down on me came second semester. Now the whole environment was overwhelming.

I once broke down in front of my roommate but I could not pour my heart to her. I once went to the university’s counselling centre because I thought I would never be able to write my final exam because of the emotional state I was in.

One night I wrote my mother a message asking her to tell me my father’s name. To my surprise, she replied immediately with the name. I was surprised because there was a time in my teenage years I asked for his name but she never gave it to me. After the birth of my son, I accepted the fact that my mother and I will never be able to have a good mother-daughter relationship and accepted that I’ would die without knowing my father.

Painful as it was, it was better to accept and move on than to always wonder with questions that I knew will never be answered.

Then what changed?

I was now far away from my son, a person I have spent two years raising up and a person I knew loved me dearly. So my source of love was miles away from me. I started seeking for attention, love. I was confronted with ‘daddy issues’ since it was the male species that I looked for attention from.
My first varsity boyfriend lasted for weeks. I knew he had a girlfriend and I thought I would be able to remove her. That left me with pain and heartache as I did not succeed in that. My second boyfriend was an ex-boyfriend I had an encounter with during the September holidays. That also did not last as I was looking for new fresh love. The third boyfriend came a few weeks later; we ran out of things to say to each other.

I had to look for another place until I found this one. The one I’m addicted to. The one who has made me see the true me but refuses to change. The one who makes me hate myself. The one who turns me into a monster. The one who makes me feel worthless, a woman with no values, morals, standards, a woman who has no direction in her life.

You see, when my mother gave me my father’’ name, she freed herself from my life of making her as my scapegoat when the going got tough. Now I had no ‘because my mother refuses to give me my father’s name’ excuse when my mild depression hits. Now I was stuck with a name. I had to find a new way to blame my mother for my life that was not going my way.

I am a woman who does not know her father and is not in good terms with her mother. I am now realising my true self but I cannot discover it because I do not know where I am from. So I am just lost, wondering with no direction, stuck in one place with a heavy heart and daddy issues. I am a typical young South African woman who was denied the opportunity to know her father and is now left to face the consequences alone.

Consequences that are always with me, are like my shadow, my other self. I am a broken, insecure, self-doubting woman who has always tried to start her life over but there is always that voice that reminds me of how messed up my life is. This is the story of a born free fatherless woman but does not have a free heart.