Caitlin Cherry
“I felt rejected. I felt not loveable enough”
Caitlin Cherry’s dad left New Zealand for Australia when she was six, then died suddenly when she was nine. Growing up with little money and less support, Caitlin knew she had only herself to rely on.
Caitlin Cherry’s dad was a handsome man. In a photo Caitlin has of him holding her as a new baby, his hair has a matinee idol’s gloss and he’s smiling down at his youngest daughter like the proud dad he was.
“He used to call me ‘Kid’. My favourite smell was the smell of the oil on his overalls,” says Caitlin, smiling as she recalls a four-decade-old aroma. “I really wish I had a pair of his overalls.”
He managed a petrol station at Paekākāriki, just north of Wellington, as well as other businesses around and about. Back then, Caitlin and her mum and dad lived in the seaside town along with her three older brothers and one older sister. Today she lives high on the hills above Wellington, overlooking the city’s south coast. As she talks to me, a dog – her cousin’s, staying over – snores softly on the sofa beside her and the wind rattles the house.
Caitlin’s good at talking. A journalist by trade, she worked at Radio New Zealand for more than twenty years, and is still sometimes on the radio. But it’s not often she gets to talk about her dad, or what happened after her parents divorced when she was five. That’s when she, her mum, and three of her four siblings moved from their big house in Paekākāriki to a smaller house, high on another windy Wellington hill.
“I was a very timid child and quite bewildered by the world. Back in Paekākāriki I lived above the end of the school field, but in Wellington I had to catch a bus to school. The concept was well beyond me, so my brother, who was six years older, would show my bus pass to the driver because I was too scared to even do that. I would sit there silently. I was one of those kids who didn't speak outside the home for ages.”
Caitlin’s mother was on the domestic purposes benefit, and their father wasn’t supporting the family, so there was very little money. “Dad knew we had no money, but he was angry at Mum because she’d reached the point in her life where she was wanting to spread her wings. Mum was constantly kind of anxious and stressed because she didn't have a job. She married at twenty, so very young, had all the other kids in her twenties then me at thirty-four. I was the late accident.”
When Caitlin was six, her father took her and her brother, then twelve, to Australia to see his parents. (As a young man, Caitlin’s father had come to New Zealand to work in the woolsheds, then met her mother at a dance, and stayed.) During the family visit to Australia, Caitlin’s grandparents set up her father with a neighbour. “He supposedly fell madly in love with this woman, who, incidentally, looked like my mother.
“So, we never saw him on that holiday. We were meant to be holidaying with our dad, and he spent the whole time with this woman. I remember I was so lonely because I was only little. I’d go to bed and cry myself to sleep every night because I wasn't with my mum, who I was used to being with. Instead, I was staying with these grandparents , who I hardly knew because they lived in Australia, and Dad was never there.
“The idea of us living with Dad – that was just never gonna happen. He wasn’t a hands-on parent in any way – just the occasional-fun parent. I mostly remember him watching rugby and drinking beer. He was that kind of dude. He ended up returning to Australia and marrying this woman. I saw him only twice between the ages of six and nine years old.”
And then Caitlin’s dad died.
“On that day I walked down the road from school to catch the bus home. Some men had been laying fresh concrete, and – as I said, I was always a bit bewildered – I obliviously walked through the fresh concrete. Now my shoes were caked in concrete, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, Mum is going to be so mad’, because honestly, we had no money. Mum was going to lose her shit because I’ve ruined my shoes. I got on the bus carrying my shoes, feeling just absolutely terrified, and walked home barefoot.
“When she saw me coming, Mum stepped out of the house with her coat on. She had makeup on, which was unusual. She looked at me and bent down on one knee and put her arms out. I knew something bad had happened. My first thought was, ‘Is it Nana?’ because that would have been the worst thing. I loved my Nana so much. She said, ‘No, darling’ and then I knew it was Dad.
“She wrapped me in her arms, which was kind of unusual, for her to be so loving,” Caitlin says with a little laugh.
“I went, ‘I ruined my shoes’, and she said, ‘That’s okay’. I followed her into the house. She went into the laundry and lovingly cleaned all the concrete off my shoes.
“And my dad was dead. And it felt very weird. Dad had died of a heart attack. He had a damaged heart, myocarditis, because years before he'd had the flu and the infection had spread to his heart. So his heart wasn't great, but he was the kind of man who carried on with his normal lifestyle – smoking, I think, and drinking beer, which is what men did back in the day.”
Immediately after finding out her dad was dead, Caitlin, her mum and siblings piled into their car to go to Paekākāriki and tell the brother she’d gone to Australia with. He was then fifteen and staying with their nana. Caitlin remembers feeling excited, and feeling guilty about being excited, to be out on a school night.
“Nana knew about Dad but hadn’t told my brother. He saw us all walk in and he just ran. He knew something was coming. Mum went out after him.”
I’m always interested in how people at school react when a bereaved child returns after a parent dies. Did the teachers say anything? Did the pupils?
The day after her dad died, Caitlin went back to school.
“No one knew what to say. They had been told my dad had died and they were just, you know… Kids, they're just idiots. We were all only nine years old. One girl went to me, ‘How’s your dad?’ and laughed. She didn’t know what else to do. I just looked at her. I remember feeling hollowed out. I felt like my insides were a bit acidic. Like someone had scraped out the insides of my body and I wasn't solid anymore.”
Caitlin didn’t get to go to the funeral. None of them did. Her dad had died in Australia so that’s where his funeral was. There was no money for airfares. “His parents, my grandparents, organised the funeral for about two days after he died. They were like that with death. If someone died, it was about getting it done,” Caitlin says with a chopping motion.
“We had a sort of memorial service here for him, but it was quite unreal because we didn’t really get to say goodbye. And I didn’t get to grieve. I cried when Mum told me he’d died, but I think that's the only time I cried. It was like suddenly I didn’t have a dad – one day he just didn’t exist anymore.
“But then again, I didn’t really have a dad anyway. The weird thing was the woman he’d married had a girl the same age as me and she had started calling him ‘Dad’.”
This, for me, is one of the really hard things about Caitlin’s story. She experienced a double whammy – firstly she was abandoned by her dad, then he died. She didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to the man who she loved despite everything. “I used to write to him to say I’d lost three teeth, or something, and maybe he’d send me twenty dollars, but other than that he gave us nothing.”
Nor did he make any provision for his children in his will.
“That was really awful. I think that affected me more as everything he had went to them, to this other girl who wasn’t even his daughter. I felt rejected. I felt – ” Caitlin searches for the right words, “ – not loveable enough. Not worthy of being protected. Not cared for. Also, my memories of him got poisoned by those feelings of rejection because I was really close to my dad.
“Something shifted in me then and I became fiercely independent. I had a bit of a ‘look out for number one’ thing going on.”
These are quite grown-up thoughts for a nine-year-old, but Caitlin remembers feeling them, even if she couldn’t have articulated it that way. They were struggling financially, and her father had money but chose not to give any of it to his own children. Their mother didn’t have the means to contest the will and Caitlin didn’t think she would have anyway.
“In some ways I think that was the right decision as it made us all resourceful. We always worked – from the age of fourteen I cleaned houses to make money, as Mum never had any money. We had a nice house but no money, so Mum took in flatmates to share costs. I bought what I needed for school with money I had earned myself.”
Caitlin’s mother’s next partner did provide her with a bit of guidance that she’s grateful for today. “After my parents split, my mother fell in love with a woman. This woman kinda became my father figure and introduced us to all this stuff. She opened my eyes to the world. She took us on camping holidays around the country. We went to the West Coast and Coromandel, and she introduced us to whitebait and eating rock oysters and crayfish, all those Kiwi things I’d never had. It was great. I still catch up with her a few times a year. They split up after about seven years. She was a big figure in my life.
“But, there were some downsides. They didn’t have a good relationship so some of that stuff was not good. It was very traumatic and terrible, but I don't blame her because it was my mother's duty to protect us.”
Over that time, Caitlin kept in touch with her paternal grandparents. “I wrote to my grandparents, and they wrote back. I like having family connections.” After that grandmother died, Caitlin saved up to fly over and see her grandfather in Hobart. He paid for her first year at university.
“Not that it was very much back then, but that was nice of my grandfather. He liked that I went to see him. Dad was never going to be the sort of dad who was in our lives. He was an absent father. But I think the biggest impact was the fact that he died and left us nothing, when he had something to give.”
Caitlin, the youngest of five children by a considerable margin, recognises by the time she was born her mum was “kind of over being a parent, she wanted to be a writer”.
“Then, after my parents separated, she basically stopped parenting. I had to make my own lunch for school from, like, the age of seven, while she stayed in bed. She was forty and single, and she went a bit crazy. So, yes, it was clear to me that my parents weren’t going to look after me. I had to look after myself.
“I am cautious and hate financial vulnerability, which makes me feel anxious. I’m sure that was tied into the depression I experienced after having my second child, when I had to go back to work much earlier than I planned after having my second son.”
Caitlin then shares a memory of sitting in a room at work, trying to pump breast milk, not getting enough, and crying. “I would have been much better off staying at home for a year, but financially that wasn’t an option. It was really terrible and I sank pretty low. It was all tied into my need to make sure I'm looking after myself financially, that I’m safe, because I can’t rely on anyone else.
“It would have been nice to have felt the security of being looked after, but I didn't feel I deserved it. I was so vulnerable because I had just had a frickin baby, so it would have been good to be looked after financially, something I’d never had.
“Once my kids were older, I really stepped into my career and started making better money. I split with their dad and have built things up so I now have financial security, which feels so good. I’ve got a lovely partner now, who is very kind and loving. I feel deserving of it, and it’s very nice to be cherished.”
Notably, along with that financial stability, especially when her sons were younger, Caitlin made sure to be well-insured so her boys would have a safety net if anything happened to her.
However, Caitlin reckons her need for security extends past the financial. She stayed in one job for twenty-two years and she hasn’t left the Wellington region often. Perhaps she stayed in some situations too long. “I’m really bad with change. It takes a lot for me to dramatically change my life.”
With her own children, Caitlin focused on ensuring they felt emotionally safe while setting them up to be independent. “I may have mollycoddled my kids a bit to make up for my lack of security. I’d say to them, ‘You need to earn your own money, but you also get to have a safe childhood. You get to be a kid. You don’t have to have the weight of the world on your shoulders. It's good for kids to have a job but that should be to buy entertainment, not for basics, like me, buying my own clothes, school stationery and tampons.”
Despite being “a shit father” Caitlin reckons her dad would have been a lovely granddad, just as his own father, “who was an arsehole to him, was quite a nice granddad to me”.
“My dad loved me as a little kid. To me he was quite a loving father, he just wasn't there a lot. My dad was taken too soon because he was a stubborn fool and didn’t look after his health, and so he didn’t get to improve as a person. He should have been a better father, but he had no role model himself. I love being a parent. It made me feel complete, in that I had all this love inside me and nowhere to give it. Then, when I had children, I had somewhere.”
Caitlin still directs some of that love towards her dad. She keeps photos of him on her phone, and sometimes posts a Father’s Day message on Facebook. And she’s moved beyond the anger she felt towards him.
“After he died, I used to pray to him when I was anxious as I thought he might have some powers to make things better for me. I imagined that he and my Nana were up there helping me, and it made me feel better.
“I think it was a nice way to feel loved, even if it was made up. It was like giving him the benefit of the doubt and deciding he would be looking out for me, of course, because I was his little girl. I placed him in that caregiver role, even in the sky, in the afterlife, and even though we weren’t religious.”
Many of us who experience a significant death at a young age become far more aware of our own mortality. That can be tricky if it tips into anxiety or phobia, but useful if it motivates adults to get their finances and health sorted for their children. “You can no longer have your head in the sand about death,” agrees Caitlin. “I always try to be healthy. My father was overweight, but luckily I've always been naturally slim. I’ve always exercised, and I eat nourishing healthy food.”
It took Caitlin longer to start looking after her mental health. It wasn’t until her thirties that she underwent counselling that helped her release some of the bitterness and anger she felt for her father. He was her father – she had to forgive him.
“Now I feel proud that I’m half him – he is where my brown hair and olive skin come from. But I feel sad I didn’t get to know Dad. I do harshly judge men who leave their children – and women, too, but there aren’t as many cases. If you have children, you don’t get to be selfish, no matter who you are. The most important thing about parenting is being there.”
Advice from Caitlin on supporting grieving children
Offer counselling and encourage children to use it
“As a kid, when you lose a parent, it’s really helpful to have a person to talk to who is on your side. I would have loved that because I was surrounded by other people who were grieving.
“At nine years old, you have no ability to make sense of it. To top it off, for me there was that feeling of rejection, that I wasn't deserving, as I wasn’t being parented or cared for, financially or in any other way.
“It would have been really handy to have had some counselling as a kid, because nobody talked to me about my feelings of rejection. If someone had just said to me, ‘You are deserving of love, your father was actually a dick, and this treatment is not okay’ that so would have helped.”