There’s a difference between a parent who didn’t know how to show up and one who didn’t want to — and most adult children spend years trying to figure out which one they had

I’m going to start this one with a confession. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to figure out which kind of father I had.

I don’t mean this as a complaint. My father is, by most measures, a good man. He stayed. He worked. He provided. He never raised his voice in any way that frightened me. He was, in the bones-and-skeleton sense of the word, present.

What he wasn’t, in any way I knew how to articulate as a kid, was emotionally available. He didn’t ask the questions that would have made me feel known. He didn’t notice, or at least didn’t say he noticed, when I was struggling. He didn’t, in the sense that became important to me later, show up.

And the question I’ve been trying to answer, on and off, for about twenty years, is the one this article is about. Was that because he didn’t know how? Or because he didn’t want to?

Those are two completely different fathers. Settling which one I had has been, more than almost any other piece of internal work, the thing that’s determined how I’ve felt about him at any given point in my adult life.

Why this question matters more than people think

I want to say, before I go any further, why I think this distinction is worth a whole article.

The two fathers produce two different kinds of grief, two different kinds of relationship in adulthood, and two different kinds of work for the adult child to do.

If you had a father who didn’t know how to show up, the grief is for what wasn’t possible. The man tried. The man, in his own clumsy way, loved you. The equipment he was given by his own upbringing was inadequate to the job. He did the best he could with what he had, and what he had wasn’t enough, and that’s a sad thing but it isn’t a personal thing. The grief, in this case, is mostly about absence. Something was missing, and it wasn’t the man’s choice to make it missing.

If you had a father who didn’t want to show up, the grief is something different and, in my experience, much harder. It’s the grief of having been, in some real sense, chosen against. The man could have been there, in the deeper way, and elected not to be. Other things were more interesting to him. Other rooms were more rewarding. You were, in the architecture of his life, a thing he attended to when he had to and avoided when he could. The grief, in this case, is about preference. He had options. You weren’t his.

You can see why settling which one you had matters. It changes the meaning of every interaction. It changes what you do with the relationship now. It changes, frankly, how angry you’re allowed to be.

Why most of us can’t tell

The thing that took me a long time to understand is that most adult children genuinely can’t tell which kind they had, and the reason isn’t stupidity. The reason is that the surface behavior is often identical.

A father who doesn’t know how and a father who doesn’t want to will, in a lot of practical situations, do exactly the same thing. They’ll both fail to ask the question. They’ll both be physically present and emotionally absent at the dinner table. They’ll both, when you try to talk to them about something real, do the thing where they nod, mumble something supportive, and change the subject.

From the kid’s perspective, sitting at the table at age fourteen, both fathers feel the same. They feel like a man who isn’t reaching back. The kid doesn’t have access, at fourteen, to the question of why. The kid just has the experience of unreached-for-ness. The why—the diagnosis—has to come later, slowly, often built up over decades of accumulated evidence.

And the evidence, when you start trying to gather it as an adult, is genuinely ambiguous. You’ll find yourself making a case in one direction on a Tuesday and the opposite direction on a Wednesday. You’ll have a phone call with your father where he asks an unexpectedly thoughtful question and you’ll think, oh, he does want to, he just doesn’t know how. And then you’ll have a Christmas where he watches the football for nine straight hours and barely speaks to you and you’ll think, no, this is who he is, this is the one he chose to be when given the choice.

The bouncing is exhausting. Most of us bounce for years.

What I’ve come to think, in my case

I want to share where I’ve landed, with the caveat that this is just my answer, in my family, with my specific father. Yours will be different.

I had, I now believe, a father who didn’t know how. The evidence isn’t anything dramatic. It’s accumulated, slow, mostly retrospective.

The biggest piece of evidence is something I noticed in my early thirties, watching my father with my sister’s young children. He’s not a man who would ever describe himself as warm. But with his grandchildren, in the brief moments when he thought no one was watching, I saw him do things he’d never done with us. He’d ask them small, careful questions about how they were feeling. He’d notice when one of them was upset. He’d, occasionally, say out loud that he loved them.

The first time I saw this, I felt a complicated and ugly thing. The first instinct was jealousy, which I’m embarrassed to admit but it would be dishonest not to. Why didn’t I get this version of him? Where was he hiding it for forty years?

The second instinct, which took longer to arrive, was something more like understanding. The version of my father I was watching with the grandchildren was a man who had, very late in his life, somehow figured out a few things that he hadn’t known when he was raising me. Not by any conscious work. By osmosis. By time. By the accidental shifting of cultural norms around his ears. The man warming up to his grandchildren wasn’t a man who’d been holding out on me. He was a man who’d genuinely not had the equipment when I was ten, and who, in his seventies, was finally—through no real effort of his own—starting to develop a piece of it.

That observation, more than anything else, is what convinced me which kind of father I’d had. He’d shown me, by accident, the version of himself that became available when life finally did some of the teaching he hadn’t been able to do for himself. The version was small and late and limited. But it was there. And the existence of it was evidence that the absence in my childhood hadn’t been a choice. It had been a deficit.

What changes, when you settle the question

I want to be honest about this, because I think the answer matters.

What changes, mostly, is internal.

The relationship doesn’t change much. My father is still my father. He still doesn’t ask the deep questions. He still goes quiet when something real comes up. The visits are still, by the standards I described in another piece, capped at about two nights before my body starts looking for the exit. The behaviors of the relationship are basically what they always were.

What’s different is the feeling underneath the behaviors. When I believed, at twenty-five, that my father had chosen against me, every interaction with him was loaded with that belief. Every silence at the dinner table was a small confirmation of his preference. Every missed question was another data point. The relationship was, in some real sense, a wound I was visiting.

Now that I believe—and I want to be careful with the word “believe,” because I’m not certain, I’m just settled enough to act—now that I believe he didn’t know how, the same silences land differently. They’re still sad. The deficit is still real. But the silences are no longer a referendum on me. They’re a feature of a man who didn’t have the tools to do anything else. The wound is still there. It’s not being actively reopened by every visit.

I love my father more steadily now than I have at any other point in my adult life. Not more dramatically. More steadily. The bouncing is mostly gone. I’m not constantly readjudicating his motives. I’ve made my peace with my best guess. The peace is what’s letting the love come through.

What if you settled the other way

I want to say something, briefly, to anyone who’s done this work and arrived at the other answer—who has, on the balance of evidence, concluded that they had a parent who didn’t want to show up.

I’m not going to pretend that’s the same situation. It isn’t. The grief is genuinely different. The relationship in adulthood is harder. The work is more substantial.

What I’d say is that arriving at the answer, even when the answer is the harder one, is its own kind of relief. Knowing where you stand is better than not knowing. The bouncing, the years of trying to figure it out, is exhausting in a way that having a settled answer—even a painful one—is not. The settled answer lets you make decisions. How much of yourself to give. How often to visit. How much of your inner life to expose to a person whose track record suggests they won’t handle it well.

And the settled answer also frees you, finally, from the work of trying to win something that wasn’t on offer. If you had a parent who didn’t want to, no amount of effort was ever going to convert them. The thirty years you spent trying weren’t wasted, exactly—they’re how you found out—but they were spent on a wrong assumption, and stopping spending them is a kind of freedom.

How to actually do the work

I’m wary of giving instructions on something this delicate, but a few things have helped me, and I’ll mention them in case any of them are useful.

The first is to look for the moments when your parent shows competence, with anyone, in the dimension where they were absent for you. If they’re capable of warmth with the dog, with a stranger at a bus stop, with their grandchildren, with a friend’s child—that’s data. The capacity exists. The non-deployment of that capacity in your direction has to be explained somehow. Sometimes the explanation is that they had it but couldn’t aim it at you, which is the worse answer. Sometimes the explanation is that they only developed it later, after the window of your childhood closed, which is the sadder but less personal one.

The second is to talk to people who knew your parent before you did. Their parents, if they’re still around. Their old friends. Their siblings. The people who saw the man before he was your father. You’ll often find clues about who he was raised by, what he was given, what he didn’t get. The clues don’t excuse anything. They contextualize.

The third is to give yourself time. This isn’t a question that gets settled in a week. It took me close to twenty years to feel like I had a stable answer, and I’m still revising at the edges. Don’t pressure yourself for a verdict. Let the evidence accumulate. Let the answer emerge slowly. The slow answer is, in my experience, much more durable than the fast one.

The thing I’d say to anyone in the middle of this

If you’re reading this and you’re somewhere in the bouncing—still trying to figure out which kind of parent you had, still flipping between the two diagnoses, still exhausted by not knowing—you’re not alone, and you’re not behind. This is, I now believe, one of the central pieces of work of being an adult child of an imperfect parent, and it takes most of us most of our adulthoods.

The answer, when it comes, is going to be a relief regardless of which one it is. Knowing what you had is better than not knowing. The work of figuring it out is one of the few pieces of work in this domain that actually changes how you feel, in a lasting way, about the most complicated person in your life.

Take your time. Watch them carefully. Watch them with other people, especially. Notice what they’re capable of and what they’re not. Notice the gap between the version of them that exists for others and the version that existed for you. Build your answer slowly, out of evidence rather than feeling.

And when you arrive at it, even if it’s the hard answer, give yourself credit. You’ve done a piece of internal work that most people never finish. The bouncing, finally, can stop.

Mine has, mostly. My father is still here. We’re still finding our way. The version of him I have access to, in his seventies, is not the version I needed at fourteen. It’s the version I have now, which is the only one on offer, which is, on balance, enough.