Rejection

This story is by Frances Haysman and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

I was six before I knew that every father didn’t have a glass eye that he could pop out at night and leave in a water-filled glass until morning. My sister and I stood on chairs in the bathroom so that we could see ourselves in the mirror and tried to pop our right eyes out as our father did. We preschoolers thought it was an incredible skill.

Dad was a WWII veteran, a sapper, a man who clears the battlefield of mines before our troops go in, and lays explosives for the enemy when our troops move out. He and his CO were dismantling a cake-tin mine meant to destroy enemy tanks and trucks, when the fuse in his hand exploded, taking his right eye and parts of his fingers on both hands. It peppered his face with minute pieces of shrapnel, and his CO’s thigh and groin, which led to his death three weeks later. My father carried the guilt of that death to his grave even though a Court of Inquiry ruled he was not at fault.

Dad was twenty-three and Mum nineteen, and they’d only been married six weeks with a three-day honeymoon, when the explosion shattered their lives. Mum was anxious to experience life after growing up in an orphanage and living through the Depression. But Dad went from being the life of the party to becoming a hermit.

My father was injured before I was born.  One of the few joyful things he did during recovery was make a stuffed rabbit for me as part of his therapy, while his mangled fingers healed.  He wanted the rabbit to make a sound when it moved, and in post war Australia, toys and the materials to make them were in short supply. He took a matchbox, filled it with dried beans, and sewed it into the rabbit’s chest. It was my only stuffy for my entire childhood. But I would have been the only post war child in Australia, with a rabbit that was cut out of fabric and stitched by hand by my father. That was mother territory at this time in history, particularly in Australia, where male and female roles were traditional and strictly defined.

I waited every day by the front door for my father to come home, cuddling my stuffed rabbit, and he would carry me on his shoulders into the house singing: Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me, And he sang as he watched and waited till his Billy boiled, You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

My father’s damaged body was beyond repair, and he was ashamed of it, but his mind was also altered; first with the force of the explosion which caused his brain to collide with his skull, but also with the emotional trauma of the day he could never forget which was etched into his body.

Mum’s brother, Laurie, was a merchant seaman who worked for the US Navy during the war, ferrying supplies up and down the east coast of Australia, from Townsville where there was an American Naval base, to Newcastle, Sydney, and Part Moresby in New Guinea. There the Australian and US troops were fighting the Japanese.

Seeing the state Dad was in, and concerned for his mental health, he invited Mum and Dad to spend time with him in Townsville on his next leave.  Mum was anxious to go. Dad refused. He was hiding his bandaged hands and his missing eye from everyone. Mum then made a decision we would both regret for the rest of our lives. She went to Townsville without him and stayed with Laurie and his girlfriend, Sylvia. She was absent when dad desperately needed her.

One drunken Saturday night, my Uncle Laurie told Dad that I wasn’t his child, sewing the seeds of doubt in a mind that had already decided he was less loveable because of his disfigured body. In Dad’s mind my body was no longer part of his body, and for the rest of my life, whenever he was angry with my mother, he would point his index finger at me and shout: You’re not mine anyway. You belong to the Yank at Townsville. Even though my face was a replica of his mother’s.

In Townsville, Mum had gone with Laurie, Sylvia, and his American serviceman friend Barney Justice, to see the movie, Brooklyn Bridge, ironically telling the story of a woman who was unfaithful to her soldier husband. Mum was never alone with Barney, and never saw him again, but that didn’t stop Laurie from telling his lie for reasons I never understood. I know he longed for his own children, and perhaps he envied Dad’s brood of three little girls, but his drunken outburst sowed the seeds of destruction for my relationship with my father and my parents marriage.

My father and the gentle person he normally was would morph into The Hulk, smashing holes in the walls with is fists, or turning the supper table over sending food and the dishes crashing to the floor. Later, his fists found our faces and shoulders. As a child I felt his anguish behind these terrifying explosions. No matter what he did, I still loved him. I spent hours watching him intently, trying to find a way to take his pain so he could be free of it.

His body signaled the coming explosion. It began with  nightmare- Dad crying out in his sleep, Mum yelling at him to wake up. Dad standing holding an imaginary rifle in his arms, groggy from sleep, becoming aware, then slowly walking to the kitchen table, while Mum settled everyone down and told us to go back to sleep. My two younger sisters fell asleep instantly, but I couldn’t. Then followed days of Dad sitting at the kitchen table at night in the dark, the red glow of his cigarette tracing a path from the ashtray to his lips. From my bunk bed in our shed, where we lived in one open space, I watched him. I wanted him to be at peace.

As an adult, and newly married, I took my rejected body 8,000 miles away to Canada, where I didn’t have to live with his rejection and the war zone of our home.

The year before he died, I spent a month with my palliative father, hoping for some kind of reconciliation. It was a fraught experience for both our bodies, his weakening with every passing day, and mine longing to hear his words of acceptance. Instead, he told me that I had done a terrible thing by taking my family away from Australia. It I’m not yours, what does it matter where I live? I said, hoping to prompt an apology and finally acceptance as his child. He didn’t budge. When I hugged his stiff and unyielding body in a final embrace, I said: I love you, Dad. He said: You’ll miss your plane.

A year later, while rushing to complete my yearly marks for my high school students so I could be at his bedside, I was working in my office at the school at 10.00 pm, alone, on a Thursday night. Dad had been in a coma since Monday, my flight was leaving Friday evening, and I had been in a state of extreme anxiety for four sleepless days. I was inputting marks and comments for over 100 students and was almost finished when I heard a voice: You don’t have to hurry anymore. I looked around my office in the deserted building and couldn’t see anyone. The voice spoke again: You don’t have to hurry anymore. 

I leaned back in my chair, terrified. I was having a nervous breakdown. That was the obvious explanation. Once you hear voices you’ve entered the twilight zone. But then I felt this strange and amazing feeling of peace, a feeling I’d not experienced before or since. It began at the top of my head where the voice had been, and flowed down quietly and swiftly like warm honey, bringing a feeling of incredible calm to my whole body, like the pallor mortis that happens to all of us when we die.

I sat quietly for almost twenty minutes, marveling at what had just happened but unable to explain or define it. Then the front doorbell rang. I floated down six flights of stairs and saw my husband and daughter through the glass panel. And everything fell into place. I knew exactly what had happened and I opened the door joyfully.

My father passed twenty minutes ago.

My husband, shocked, said: How did you know?

I think he said goodbye, and I doubt he would have done that if I wasn’t his.