Daddy issues
The 9th episode in my formative sex & relationship series.
After 2 years of demoralizing male encounters, an older man unexpectedly opens the floodgates to a new paradigm. As I start to equate safety with an older crowd, the universe delivers tenfold as older men start coming out of the woodwork-whether I like it or not.
*Heads up* I mention sex (nothing graphic)
In this series:
Ep 14 :: Seeding disenchantment
Ep 16 :: Petroleum engineering smart
Ep 17 :: Sex and the city
Ep 18 :: Part of the job
Ep 19 :: Hawaiian breeze era
Ep 20 :: Time out (update episode)
Ep 21 :: Risky business
Ep 22 :: That kind of girl
Ep 23 :: Under the influence
Ep 24 :: Sex therapy (update episode)
Hanging out with some older men on my birthday 🍺🎂
🪚✏️📐🔨
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This is Divine Interruption, I'm Sarah Hildreth Rankin. Hi, welcome back. So I'm going to pick up where I left off in my Sex and Relationships series a little while ago now.
I just can't seem to express all of these things that are coming up for me in a linear fashion. It's almost like they just tell me when they want to make themselves known. So I've bounced around quite a bit.
But right now, this experience again is getting loud, and it's like, talk about the last relationships. And I just like can't stop thinking about it. And really, that's quite a reflection of life.
Like we're a big jumble of experiences and thoughts and memories and perceptions, and it's not all neat and tidy. So of course, this process is not going to be neat and tidy. So let's go back.
If you haven't listened to any of the episodes in this series, I would recommend it. I mean, it really does show a progression over time, and there's going to be references that are going to make more sense if you've listened to the past episodes.
So if you haven't listened to any of them, I would recommend starting with episode 14, that Seeding Disenchantment, and just following each episode after that. And my last one in this series was episode 23, Under the Influence.
So they'll all be linked in the show notes here, if you just want to pop down and start somewhere. Heads up, I'm going to mention sex in this episode. Nothing scandalous or graphic.
I'm just letting you know.
So after a couple years of living in this small town, this mountain town, Jasper, especially after all of the experiences that I had, the assault I talked about in my last episode, really a general shift had definitely occurred.
All of these experiences, one after another, just compounded on each other. I'd really been shown and told again and again how much I didn't matter. I felt like I wasn't attractive.
I wasn't girlfriend material. I was disposable. You know, men only wanted to sleep with me, but there was also something really shameful and embarrassing about sleeping with me.
And I became fodder for lies and jokes and humiliation. I came to the conclusion that I just wasn't the kind of girl worth respect or time or kindness. And I really started to believe what life was showing me.
So all of these experiences led me to believe this now about myself. Now, I'd had an experience with an older man during my first summer there, who actually took me on a few dates. And he's like, hey, I want to take you on a tour around town.
You're new. And maybe we can go for a beer after. And he actually wanted to get to know me as a person.
And then he offered to have me over another time, and he cooked dinner for me. And we had a lot in common. He was really funny, he was thoughtful, he was respectful.
He invited me to be and hang out with his friends. But I remember deep down just knowing that I wasn't into having a relationship with him. I did not want to take it further, but it was really hard because I really liked him.
But I was 19, and he must have been in his mid-30s at the time, and it just wasn't for me. I knew that, but at the same time, it was like I was making a friend, I was making a connection, and I didn't know a lot of people.
And he was just so nice and kind, and I was like, oh, I really enjoy being with him. I just don't want to be in a relationship with him, or I don't want anything romantically. I didn't want to hurt his feelings.
I didn't want to make it weird. I didn't want him to think that I was leading him on. It was really hard.
I don't know, it was hard. But we moved through it. We moved on.
I don't know if I was very upfront with him. Likely not, seeing as my track record was like null at that point of speaking up or saying anything at all at that point. But he was actually mature about it.
As far as I remember, we could still talk. I could still see him at work. I could see him out around town, and he was still kind to me, and didn't bring anything up or make me feel like I was a horrible person.
But over the course of the next year or so, as I had all of these other experiences, something shifted somewhere along the lines.
And I'm not sure if it was conscious or not, but it was like I came to the conclusion, after so many degrading and damaging interactions with men my own age, as I've talked about throughout this series, now I felt the only place I could land would be
with an older man. And it was actually this earlier experience with this older man, when I first moved there, that was a part of that.
It was like he had imprinted something on me before this chaotic storm of really losing myself had started to happen, because that was one of the only interactions where it actually felt like I'd been safe, where I'd been in control on some level,
where he respected me as a human being above all of the other things. He had treated me like an equal, like I was worthy of attention, kindness, interest. He told me that he was attracted to me. He told me that I mattered and really gave me respect.
And I think after that experience, I kind of equated this sense of safety and approval with older men. It didn't necessarily mean I wanted to be in relationship with much older men, but I had somehow attached these two things.
I put together an equation in my brain that said youth equals value. Because I didn't seem to have anything that men in my dating pool wanted, but with older men, I actually had a valuable currency. And that currency was my age.
They would want me, they would approve of me, they would respect me, they would have me. And energy is so funny like that. You've likely experienced this in one way or another.
Once you've made some sort of internal shift and your perception is different about whatever it may be, what shows up for you in your daily life is different.
And it's not that these older men didn't exist before, as I'm going to talk about, but now it's like I had opened a tiny crack in a window somewhere inside of me, and now older men were appearing in my life differently.
So I'd gotten to know many people working at this bakery, locals and the like. It was a normal hangout for retired folk, and it was always a regular stop off before people went to work or for coffee breaks or lunchtime.
And there was this RAF guide who would come in every so often, we're going to call him Steve. He was upbeat, he was talkative, he was friendly. He was that guy that knew everyone and would talk to literally anyone.
And you always knew when he was around. So he was loud, he took up space, he had this booming voice. He was definitely much older than me, I was 20 at the time.
But he also seemed just young because he was living this lifestyle of someone in their early 20s, and he just had a lot of energy. One night, I was out with my friends, we were at the bar, and we ran into him.
And he was so excited to see us, he'd say, bakery girls, bakery girls, which was actually a common thing that happened to all of the women who worked there frequently with different people. And he ended up dancing with us all night.
And as we walked home, I remember he was walking with us and he's like, oh, my place is on the way. He was very, very drunk. And we just kind of walked with him or making jokes.
And at some point, we split off to go to our place, but he keeps walking with us. We're like, okay, like we didn't really know what his deal was, but we're like, okay.
And then we go into our house and then he just follows us into our house and we're like, this is kind of weird. What do we do? I don't know.
I remember we both climbed into the same bed and just put the covers over our head. And we're like, what's going to happen? What's happening?
Do we do anything? Do we tell him to leave? What's happening?
It was just one of those awkward situations. And at some point, he got just disoriented, as if he's like, where am I? And then he just left.
Because I remember thinking, I don't want anything to happen with this guy. This is this guy that we just see around town. He's older.
That's weird. No. But then I would see him around more often and see him out again at the pub and the bar.
And now he would come sit with us. And I remember thinking, oh, he's so friendly. He's so outgoing.
You know, he's being nice to me. He's showing me attention. Do I?
Do I like him? And then at some point over the course of time, we did end up sleeping together. I had developed this crush on him, and after being together the first time, we kind of continued to see each other.
And it was that awkward phase of anything where you just, you don't know where the other person stands, and maybe they don't know where you stand, or what you want. And so then, you just don't talk about it, right? I don't know, it was confusing.
I would see Steve out at a coffee shop, or the laundromat, or the video store, and we would talk, and we would banter, just like he did with everyone else. And then that was kind of it.
Except that randomly, he would also show up at my place late at night, and we would have sex, or he would invite me over to his place when his roommate was away, and we would sleep together.
There was never any discussion if he liked me, or what this was, or where it was going. It was happening consistently. I think really I was already used to getting my hopes up regardless, and assuming that a relationship was not possible for me.
So I just kind of kept going with this situation, and I tried to push past the disappointment I felt in him. Maybe not wanting anything more with me, and I was trying to actively move on, because this is happening over the course of months, right?
Where we're doing this again and again, and I'm like, oh, I like you. And I'm like, oh no, I like you more. But no, no, no.
Okay. I can't say anything. He obviously doesn't want to do this.
And when I say I was trying to move on, of course, I don't actually mean I moved on. You know, that would be too healthy. That would be too obvious.
It just meant I continued to sleep with him randomly in the background whenever he came calling. Now, the weird thing was that once I had slept with Steve, it was as if like the word got out or something.
And I'm not saying that's actually what happened, but it was as if the universe said, oh, okay. Oh, you're actually serious about this. This is what you believe you want or what you think you're worth.
This is what you want now. Well, oh, okay. Here you go.
It was as if all these older men started coming out of the woodwork. Men who had previously just been older guys in town, regulars at the bakery, railroad guys or construction workers, just ordinary older men out of my purview romantically.
Now they were showing up differently. These were customers, dad types, people who I connected with through my job. These were men that I had gotten to know in a friendly, you know, peer kind of way, often like in an almost paternal capacity.
These were the men who would talk to me every morning, you know, check in on me, see how I was doing, how my day was going, and I got to know them really well.
And because I was newly living on my own, it did feel that these relationships really mattered to me. You know, they were a part of my community, and that was really important, having community.
And that's also something really special with a small town that I found. Was, oh, there is a community here. People know each other, and they show up for each other.
So these men would ask me about my future plans or how my weekend was going, and sometimes they would offer support or advice, those kinds of things. So these relationships mattered. But now these men, many of them were starting to shape shift.
And it was as if the rules had just changed or something, the boundaries, they just started to bend and change. There was the divorced railroader. He had two teenage sons.
I would serve him coffee multiple times a day. And after, I'd say, a year and a half, two years, he invited me and my friend to this large get-gether at his house. Oh, come to my house.
I'm having a big thing. And then we find out that this large get-gether has turned into like, oh no, it's an exclusive party. Okay, then the exclusive party becomes an exclusive hot tub party.
And then the exclusive hot tub party, we are now requested to wear bikinis to. So we did not go to said party. But this man had just shifted one day, and all of a sudden, he was asking us to go to his house and wear bikinis.
And I was like, no, you're like my dad. I thought we were friends. There was the coffee supplier I'd been working with for a long time.
I was out at the bar one evening, and he sought me out. He's like, hey, can I buy you a drink? I said, sure.
Like, I thought we were just friendly through work because that had always been the case. He was at least 25 years older than me, but he definitely thought something was gonna happen.
And he became so rude and aggressive when I wouldn't allow him to kiss me after I drank my Long Island iced tea. And he was double upset when I didn't accept his offer. Point blank, he just asked me, come home with me.
And I said, no. But it was apparently him buying me this one drink at 4.30 on a Thursday that entitled him to my body after we'd only talked about coffee for like two years.
Or there was my friend's literal dad, who I'd gotten to know along with my other friends when he'd come into the bakery or we'd occasionally, you know, see him at her house. He offered to buy me a drink one night out.
And when I said, no, no, thank you, he was visibly upset, and he just put that on me. It was as if I was this person who should be giving him this thing. He needed this interaction, and there was something at play here.
Later, I was told that he had known and had mentioned that he knew I was into older guys. And I was like, what? What is this weird thing?
How does he know this? That's not even necessarily true. But yeah, all of these people were showing up in new ways.
And it was as if after I had the shift in mentality around my youth being my value, and continuing of course to randomly sleep with Steve, things just changed in this weird way. And I didn't necessarily want this to happen.
It was part conscious, part unconscious. I didn't particularly like having these older men suddenly see me as available, or openly shifting from a safe platonic friend to a potential sexual conquest. That's not what I wanted.
It didn't necessarily feel good, and it made things really confusing for me. I just didn't know where the boundaries were. And now, I don't know, I started to almost like not trust people.
I didn't trust what their intentions were. I felt like these boundaries were so muddied that I didn't know if I could just be nice to someone, right? Are they gonna misconstru that?
Is it gonna come across the wrong way? And then are they gonna be upset with me? And then they're not gonna talk to me?
Like, it became really muddled. But in a messed up way, I had also now confirmed that older men did see value in me when other more age-appropriate men didn't.
So it didn't matter that perhaps I felt like, ugh, like a bit of a yuck factor in there, or maybe that I didn't always find them attractive specifically for me in terms of like age at that time, or even that maybe I judged them for liking me that
way. Like, it was all very effed up, but I had gone beyond any boundary I may have had, and now it was almost like it's all fair game. So as I am still seeing Steve in the background, all these other things are happening on a day-to-day basis, right?
And one of those particular men that I fully remember, he was a regular tradesman. He would come into the bakery frequently. He was really friendly.
He was very soft-spoken, like he barely said anything. He wouldn't even make eye contact sometimes. He's very shy.
But there was also something very masculine about him. Like he was super scorched from the sun. He would wear overalls.
His clothes were always covered in like sawdust or paint or grease. And I can't tell you why this did it for me. It still does.
He would wear one earring, just like a tiny little hoop earring, and then he would put a pencil behind his ear. Oh, I just, I called him Carpenter Man. One night at the pub, I remember someone saying, do you ever think that you have daddy issues?
And then this guy, he points over, and there's Carpenter Man, he's at the bar. And he says, because if you do, maybe you should talk to my friend here. But just, he said, the caveat is, do not break his heart.
So I did. I went over and I sat with him, and I had a very long conversation about Jamaican rum. He was extremely drunk, but I got to know him a little bit better.
I don't really know how I felt. It was more just like, oh, this is nice. This is fun, didn't think too much of it.
The next day, he came into the bakery, and as he's going to pay, he takes the pencil from behind his ear, and he put it behind mine. And I almost died. It was like the most exciting and romantic moment.
I wanted to explode. I don't know. It was just like all these things at once.
I was like, wow, that is so attractive. That is so romantic. And here's the thing, I was attracted to him, and I also felt that he was just a really good person.
And he gave me those same feelings as the older guy that I'd been out with when I'd first arrived in town, like that safe feeling.
But I did also feel like he was definitely too old for me, and I also felt uncomfortable imagining like actually doing anything with him. And I think that's what you call instinct, that's what you call intuition.
Like I already knew, I was like, oh, I don't want to be in a relationship with this person, this isn't for me. But there was this part of me that had been rejected, that had been ripped apart, that had been abused and put down like again and again.
And that part of me like needed to know that I was valuable and worthwhile. That very like childlike part of me, who just wanted to feel accepted, like cared for, I wanted to be wanted by someone. And so I let something happen with Carpenter Man.
I saw him out again one night after we had many drinks, we stumbled together through town, we ran across a schoolyard, we laid in a field and looked at the stars. It was all super nice and it was exciting.
But I remember being like very consciously, like, do I want to do this? Like, this is a good person. What am I doing?
I think it's even being at that age when you want experiences and you're craving to live life, and you almost need to bump up against things to figure out sometimes how you feel or what you want or what that would be like.
Which is kind of, it's obviously very exciting, but it's confusing, and people can get hurt along the way. And in a way, like, I already knew, right?
I already knew, like, no, I'm not gonna want to do this again or be with this person seriously, but can I then hang out with him in this capacity and no one will get hurt? Like, I already knew it was not a good idea.
But there we are, lying in the field, looking at the stars, and he's like, oh, let's go to my place. So I follow him. He takes me up a fire escape of an old house, and then we're making out on this fire escape.
I'm like, okay, we're in the moonlight, we're on the railing, and we're out in the open. And it was just really exciting. And it was different.
And I just tried to be in the moment. We eventually make it into his house. He lived in this really tiny attic, essentially, with a triangle ceiling.
And he tells me, this is the bed that I built for myself. Out of the old oak tree. I'm like, oh, wow.
And then he introduces me to his dog. It's like this old golden retriever. He's like, this is yellow dog.
Like, oh, straight out of old yellow from the 1950s. Like everything about him was good and solid and real and honest. We're making out, we're sitting on some chair.
I'm sitting on top of him. And at some point, I just pull off his hat. And that's when I realized he was completely bald under there.
He had the ring of hair at the bottom, but the rest of his head was just shiny and smooth and bald. And look, no judgment. Like we don't have control over these things, right?
And I don't find baldness unattractive at all. It's just that it was really unexpected because I'd never seen him without a hat before, and I hadn't thought about that.
And then all of a sudden, this put like a marker in the sand around our age difference. I was like, oh, okay, like you are significantly older than I am.
We had sex, and after he goes to use the bathroom, which is unfortunately, you know, in his tiny attic room right across from the bed, and unfortunately has a curtain for a door. Just for the most obvious reasons, it was just really embarrassing.
And look, we're all human. Doesn't have to be embarrassing to use the bathroom, but oh boy, he's just in there, I'm hearing everything.
And I was still very much at that age where my comfortability with things like that, I didn't know how to deal with a situation like that, and I just couldn't talk about it. I couldn't make light of it.
I grew up in a home where nothing like that existed. Oh, no one uses the bathroom. No one passes gas, right?
So I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm hearing it, and I feel so embarrassed. I don't know what to do. And there was one other night where he just showed up at my place.
Now whenever I say this, I'm like, I think I've said this a lot. I keep wondering how all of that happened. How are people just always showing up at my place?
But that really did happen. I think it was a small town thing and also a not having a cell phone thing. Doesn't matter.
He shows up at my place. He smells like gasoline and sawdust. He barely talks and we do stuff.
He wakes up early in the morning. He's like, I need to go take care of Yellow Dog. And I need to get back to building houses.
You know, he's very stoic and has this work to do. And my roommate comes in shortly after and she's like, hey, can you come out and see this? Like, what is this?
I go out to the hallway with her and she points at the walls and I'm like, oh, there were like hand prints and greasy smudge marks all along the walls, leading all the way from my room, down the hallway, up to the front door.
He was literally coated in grease and hard work, and he left his mark on our apartment. And he lived up to his name. He was the carpenter man.
Now, I don't want this to come across as judgmental because it's really not meant to be. I just felt like we were from two entirely different worlds. We had these stark differences, right?
His age, his lifestyle, his background, how he communicated. He had this life, he had this work that he did. Everything was kind of set up for him.
And I just was like, oh no, all those differences is what made it so exciting and like interesting and charged, right? Like we didn't even talk. It was just like, you are a man covered in Greece and I'm kind of into this.
But I already knew the first time we'd been introduced that I wasn't prepared to be like serious about anyone, but I also felt kind of guilty and gross for hanging out with him in that way.
Even if it was just to experiment and like I enjoyed his company and all of that, I was like, oh, is this like unfair? And I did not know how to voice that. And honestly, age was a thing.
I didn't actually want to date older men. I knew it wasn't going to work for me. Even when they were kind, good, solid, interesting people at that age, what, 19, 20, 21, like age did matter.
And a guy being 15 plus years older than me did make a difference. It's so obvious to see this in hindsight, but at the time, my subconscious fears just kept pushing this narrative. This is your future.
This is the only way. You need to make this concession. You're not good enough.
Take what you can get. No one else will love you. No one else finds you attractive.
So I overrode those feelings of already knowing, oh no, this isn't for me. This is going to get messy. It's going to get tangled.
I still wanted to see if it would work, right? I'm like, no, but Sarah, you have to do this because no one else is ever going to want to be with you, and you're going to be alone forever, whatever those things are.
And in keeping with my track record at the time, I secretly hoped that this experience would kind of fade into the background. And I'm like, oh, we can keep those experiences on a shelf for what they were, and we'll never have to deal with it.
But then I would see his red truck driving down the main strip of town, and I'd see Yellow Dog in the back, and I'd know. I'm like, oh, I'd actually start to panic. I would feel sick.
I'm like, oh, no, he's going to slow down. He's going to say hi. And I did not want to be mean.
I didn't also want to lead him on to think that I wanted more, even though I'm like, I really like you. Obviously, it just felt hard. It felt hard.
It felt confusing. And as far as I remember, I never said anything. I never was honest.
I never expressed myself. I just probably pretended like it didn't happen, which is not helpful for anyone. But yeah, in the background, Steve was still around.
We were still sleeping together. He was still not acknowledging that it was anything. And I'm pretty sure I was making it known in certain ways that I wanted more.
I was trying to turn it into more. But everything he was showing me, in the way that we were communicating or that we'd be meeting at his bequest at night, was saying like, this isn't for you, Sarah. This isn't going to work.
But I just didn't think I was worth anything better. I really didn't, and I didn't think someone else was going to come along, or the fact that I actually did also like him. I was like, oh, okay.
Well, these two things are combined like this is all of God. And I also want to say, I don't actually have any judgment about age gap relationships. And I think for many people, it likely could work.
Do you know what I mean? For me at the time, the experiences I did have, they just were not working, and I already felt that they weren't for me.
It's not an objective judgment on everyone, because I don't think that's the case, and I think it can work out. I had feelings already, and yet I kind of overrode those feelings at the time.
So we'll pick up in the next episode about Steve and the slow train wreck that ensues after that. Okay, thanks so much.
