Bridget Hart

CN: Mental health, trauma, abandonment

I have been quite slack at keeping up the written side of my blog due to mental health reasons but am back now to share a new video I made with the help of editor and colourist Vicky Bee. The film accompanies the poem 4th July 2008 which is featured in my chapbook Better Watch Your Mouth.

The poem is about rejection, mostly. It’s got all the ugly feelings that I feel towards a man I call my dad because I don’t know what else to call him, I don’t want to use his name because it humanises him. On the date in question I met him for the first and only time, it was to be ‘our little secret’ – he wasn’t ever going to tell him family, his sons, his wife that he had met me, I wasn’t important enough. Unfortunately he underestimated my internet search skills and I found my brothers independently a few years after, and have been in sporadic contact with them since.

Fathers abandoning their daughters is such a common thing, I know so many women who have never known, or had their father leave during their childhood which causes horrible mental health problems down the line. I made this video because I am angry. I am angry at men who face no responsibility for their actions. I’m angry that they get to leave and have a fresh start. That our fresh starts are never fresh, always stale from tired feelings of resentment and desperation. I sometimes feel I will never be a person without trauma, but if channeling that into something creative is the best way to do it, then let’s do that instead of beating ourselves up because we never ever feel good enough.

For every one who has been left, felt inadequate and not enough their whole lives, this poem is for us.