Given our dear daughter Michelle's long silence in communicating with her father, I first thought: "It must be a complicated situation" in her current stage of her 38-year old life. Let it ride …
Background: Many months ago I responded by email (with, frankly, now with feelings of guilt) re her "failure to communicate," with my two acidic e-mails comments about her potential inheritance.
Keeping in touch was an essential element in my side of the Brown family — especially with my poet Father — a standard to which I strongly adhere (but not always, regrettably, observe), even during passing "family squabbles."
Seeking advice and (quite frankly, understanding/support) re darling daughter Michelle, I recently decided to share my concerns with dear friends our 38 year-old divorced childless daughter's "canceled" relationship with her father, at a time coinciding (?) with when she evidently ended her affiliation with the University of Denver (UD) in seeking an MA in Anthropology (on a full scholarship — bravo Michelle!), closing this contract this year for reasons unknown to me.
Not long ago, I spoke over the phone with a secretary at UD about Michelle's whereabouts; she said Michelle was no longer affiliated with UD, stating she was unable give me a forwarding address where I could contact her.
Among my dear friends, with whom I could not but help — after months of keeping it "within my former family" — recently to express my concerns about our daughter, despite my initial reservations (why should I bother them with ex-family "issues"), one suggested that Michelle may be suffering from depression, which she (the friend) herself had to endure.
Am I, as a father, responsible for this condition (if it exists)? So my conscience, whatever it may be, asks. If she is suffering from depression, what can be done? At least, if she/her mother (if Michelle could tell me re mother) could tell me.
I realize that, over the many years of our sadly deteriorating marriage in its late years, I have been by no means been a "father knows best" father — despite hoping, with us together, to provide our daughter the best (or so I believed) (1) international experience/exposure, so important in our "global world"; (2) doing our best to provide her access to top-rate high-school/college education, without student loans she would have to repay (so far as I could tell), my hoping that these achievements, as accepted, were essentially her own without the burden of debt; (3) my supporting her upon graduation from college (granted, non-financially) as best I could, with interfering/intruding in her personal life, given her failed one-year experiment in marriage, in her academic assignments to Central Asia and her poetry writings, among them at Politics and Prose (to which I wasn't invited).
I wish you and your daughter all the best for the New Year.Original Article
