Contemplations: The Disposable Dad
No Value Beyond Our Provision
Hey Friends,
I’ve been thinking a lot about how people become strangers.
Not all at once. Not because of one moment. But through a series of small microfractures that nobody fully names.
Sometimes… we don’t lose people. We change the story about them. And then we live inside that story… until something cracks.
This writing comes from that place. From the tension between love and distance. From the confusion of hearing “I love you”… while being treated like you don’t belong anywhere near.
It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to survive… and the ones we eventually have to unlearn… if we want to heal.
They did not exile him all at once. That would have been too obvious. Too honest. Instead, it happened the way most things fall apart—quietly… gradually… with just enough justification to make it feel righteous. Self-righteous.
At first, he was the hero. The one who stayed. The one who carried more than his share and said less than he should have. The one who absorbed tension like a wall absorbs sound. Invisible… but necessary.
But here is what no one said out loud: he never claimed to be the hero. Never asked for the role. Never wanted the spotlight.
He knew his flaws. Carried them, too. Knew the sharp edges of his own voice, the moments he got it wrong, the times he failed to show up the way he should have.
He did not argue with that part of the story. Because it was true, but truth… partial truth… can be rearranged. Edited. Weaponized.
In the beginning, love was simple. Messy, yes… but sincere. They laughed in kitchens. Sat too long at tables. Talked over each other—not because they didn’t care… but because they assumed there would always be more time.
There always is… until there isn’t.
Then something shifted. No one could quite name it. But you could feel it. Like pressure in the air before a storm.
Fear entered the house quietly. Not through the front door. Fear never does that. It came in through glances, through tone, through the stories people started telling themselves… about each other.
He became harder to understand. Or maybe… they stopped trying.
When pain goes unspoken, it doesn’t disappear. It translates into suspicion, into narrative, into certainty. And certainty… is where listening goes to die.
They began to say things like: “He’s changed.” “He’s not who we thought he was.” “We see him clearly now.”
But clarity without curiosity… is just judgment wearing a disguise.
There is another saying, older than the first: When a system cannot hold its pain… it will reassign it. And so they did. Not consciously. But effectively.
He became the container. The scapegoat. The explanation. The problem. The hero… suddenly rewritten into a villain.
He tried to speak. At first. Tried to explain the weight he was carrying, the confusion he felt, the grief that had no name. But words, once mistrusted, lose their power. And eventually… he stopped.
Silence is not always surrender, but self-protection. Sometimes it is what remains… when no one is listening. He learned more about his own neurodiversity. It only made him feel worse. Less capable. More alienated.
They called it distance. He called it survival. Avoidance became easier—not because it felt good, but because it hurt less than knocking on a door that no longer opened.
And in the absence of truth… stories grow. This is how love begins to alchemize. Not into something higher… but into something colder. Resentment. Suspicion. Rewriting.
Alchemy is not always gold. Sometimes it is the slow turning of connection into distance, of intimacy into narrative, of love into something unrecognizable.
They said they were protecting themselves. He said nothing.
Because somewhere along the way… he realized something devastating: they were no longer relating to him. They were relating to the story of him. Perhaps what others said about him. And stories are easier to control than people.
There is a place in certain traditions called the realm of the hungry ghosts. Beings with large stomachs… and narrow throats. Always craving. Never able to receive.That made sense to him.
That is what they became to each other. Hungry for validation. Starving for truth. Unable to swallow either.
Grief does not always come when someone leaves. Sometimes it comes later… when you realize who you turned them into.Maybe he was just beginning to see who they always were.
Years passed. Or maybe just months. Time moves strangely when truth is avoided. When Dad became disposable.
Then one day… someone remembered. Not fully. Not enough to undo what had been done. But enough to feel it.
A moment. A flash. A memory that didn’t fit the narrative. The way he used to show up. The way he stayed. The things he carried quietly.
And in that moment… certainty cracked open and truth began to bleed out.
But here is the hardest truth: not all realizations come in time. Sometimes it's too late. Because some things… once said… cannot be unsaid. Some things… once done… cannot be undone.
And there are moments when a quieter truth settles in. Not spoken. But felt. The absence of presence begins to whisper: You probably won’t see each other again.
Not in the way you once did. Not in the way you thought you always would. And that is where the confusion lives.
“I love you,” spoken. “Don’t come near me,” lived. Two truths… that cannot share the same space.
And so they remain suspended. Unresolved. Echoing in different rooms of the same house.
Sometimes the hero is gone… before the story is corrected. And what remains is not resolution, but ache. The kind that doesn’t shout. The kind that hums quietly beneath everything.
This is the grief no one prepares you for: not losing someone… but losing the truth about them. And then, slowly… finding it again. Too late to fix. But not too late to understand.
And this is where the story could end. With heartache. With distance. With the quiet echo of what will likely never be repaired.
But life… especially the second half of it… does not ask for perfect endings. It asks for something else.
It asks us to make sense of the first half. To sit with what we were, what we did, what we didn’t know, what we refused to see.
To atone—not in grand gestures—but in quiet honesty. To say: I was wrong there. I didn’t understand then. I hurt people… even when I felt justified.
Because that is the harder truth: many of us are blind to the harm we cause. Not because we are evil… but because we are wounded.
And wounded people have a way of keeping score. Of doing unto others what they believe has already been done to them… and calling it justice.
But healing asks for a different kind of courage. The courage to stop the cycle. To put the weapon down… even when you still feel the bruise.
To forgive yourself for what you didn’t know when you didn’t know it. And to accept something that feels almost impossible at first: that you are imperfect… and still worthy of love.
Not later. Not once you fix everything. Not once the story is corrected.
Now.
Everything dies in its own way… and in its own time. Relationships. Versions of people. Stories we once believed were permanent. Even the roles we played in each other’s lives.
The hero. The villain. The misunderstood. They all fade eventually.
But something remains. Not the story we told. Not the version we defended. But the truth we are finally willing to live with.
And sometimes… that truth is quiet. It doesn’t reunite what was lost. It doesn’t undo what was done. It doesn’t bring people back.
But it softens something inside of us. Makes us gentler. Less certain. More human.
And maybe… that is the redemption we are given. Not a restored past… but a different future.
One where we listen a little longer. Judge a little slower. Love a little wiser.
Because sometimes we don’t get to go back and fix the story. But we do get to decide who we become… after we finally understand it. And, will we be able to live with ourselves we wake up to truth, even though he forever gone.
Be careful the story you choose to believe… it may be the one you have to live with. Like he always said, you can't unscramble those eggs.
For what's worth.
Shalom,
Jeremy E.
Wise