Erin Williams
Blood Work
The night before my father’s intervention, I lay in bed scrolling dating apps with the numb familiarity of muscle memory, less longing than habit. I’m rarely taken by anyone in the parade of middling, performative heterosexual male potential. The assemblage of poorly lit selfies, defiant gym angles, vague proclamations of emotional availability, and curated irony rarely enthralls, but something about the proximity of tomorrow, the gravity of the scene that would doubtless unfold, sharpened my attention in a way it ordinarily resisted. I noticed, with a flicker of disbelief that felt almost comic in its timing, not one but two men listing “women with daddy issues” as a dating preference, nestled casually between “Capricorn” and “having fun.”
I turned to Reddit, where the explanation arrived with unsettling clarity. A woman with “daddy issues,” according to this vernacular, is easier: pliable, emotionally available, acclimatized to inconsistency. What startled me wasn’t the cruelty, but how it passed as rational preference, as though injury itself had acquired market value.
My father has been drinking for longer than I’ve been alive. At eighty, his body no longer attempts dignity. He hasn’t bathed since July. He collapses into rooms without a clear narrative of how he arrived there. His speech has softened into the indistinct slur of someone no longer moving with time. As I lay there in the dark, watching men eroticize a mythologized fragment of this experience on my iPhone, I felt that grotesque disjunction sharpen. The thing they desired so casually was the psychic residue of the slow and ordinary violence I’ve waded through all my life. Long before I had language for it, I learned adaptation, how a house reorganizes itself around an unpredictable center, how a family calibrates its moods around unspeakable volatility, how love learns to make itself small.
As a child, I used to fall asleep to the sound of my parents’ dinner parties. I found comfort in the laughter, the percussion of clinking glasses, the fog of cigarette smoke rising through the house. I misrecognized those evenings as glamorous, adult, faintly cinematic, as though the disorder itself were evidence of richness. Only later did I learn the predictable rhythms: the five o’clock whistle, the soft thud of the refrigerator door, the uncorking of pinot grigio, the liquid glug into a thin-stemmed glass, the satisfied hush of the first sip. Before he retired over a decade ago, his drinking was confined to evenings, as was appropriate in our particular WASP cosmology. The pleasure was earned.
That framework has since collapsed. Now he starts in the morning and drinks all day and night. Retirement dismantled the final scaffolding of accountability. What remains is a man moving through time without markers for beginning or end. The house bends conspicuously around the heft of his deterioration.
I was fifteen when I first moved out. I was twenty-six when he hurled a wine glass at my head during a late-night argument, the impact lodging on the wall some- where behind my eyes, primitive and unmistakable. I was twenty-eight when he collapsed in the bathroom after we’d been drinking together, when my mother explained the next morning with quiet, brittle horror that he’d fallen asleep in a pool of his own blood, two fewer teeth sloshing behind his lips.
At twenty-nine, I got sober. With sobriety came the terrible clarity of witnessing his drinking unfiltered, its logic no longer softened by my own participation. The small, crooked intimacy we once shared in mutual intoxication disintegrated into a distance that felt both protective and mournful. At forty-three, that distance has widened into something like a chasm.
A few months ago, my mother and I sat together one early morning on my couch, coffee cooling between us, and she told me he’d collapsed again at night. She hadn’t heard it. The next day, she found a heap of blood-soaked clothing and threw them away. Her voice carried no flourish, only weary reportage. A bureaucracy of care.
This is what woundedness actually demands: logistics, coordination, patience— the slow recalibration of one’s life around unthinkable and unresolvable fragility. It is unglamorous, repetitive. It’s structurally banal. It redistributes energy so relentlessly that romanticization feels obscene.
The father who drinks is not an aberration but an archetype. His failure becomes ambient, atmospheric, folded into the rhythms of heterosexual family life. The eldest daughter becomes fluent in emotional translation: scanning affect, anticipating disruption, regulating herself for continuity. These are not romantic qualities but survival technologies. My mother had learned this grammar long before my father—her own father was an alcoholic too—and by the time she married, she already knew the quiet choreography of appeasement, how to calibrate herself around male volatility as though it were simply the terrain of love. I recognized it instantly, not only as inheritance, but as something I’d already rehearsed myself.
What has shifted is the legibility of this dynamic as desirable, not its presence. What was once submerged has become articulated preference, recoded as compatibility. The wounded woman now circulates as erotic residue, her adaptation mistaken for temperament, her survival reframed as asset. “Daddy issues,” in this context, operates not as diagnosis but shorthand: a woman pre-trained in accommodation, whose instinct is to regulate rather than rupture. Her hypervigilance becomes attentiveness. Her anticipatory softening reads as care. What was once pathology is now personality. Endurance as erotic capital.
The men who articulate this preference don’t imagine themselves as exploitative. They describe themselves as unafraid of “complexity” or capable of “intensity.” But what they encounter as intensity is simply disciplined coping, the predictable grammar of someone trained to stabilize another’s volatility at the cost of her own.
Male fantasy doesn’t dare imagine the true shape of a wound. It doesn’t imagine the daughter scrubbing blood from bathroom tile or drafting an intervention letter meant to persuade a man who would rather drink than see his kids again. It imagines a woman who will not ask for much, who understands emotional distance as orientation rather than absence. The bureaucratic, exhausting, and corrosive wound itself is expunged. Only its usability survives.
And when that usability falters, when the accumulated strain of adaptation finally collapses into speech, resistance, or anger, the narrative reverses immediately. The woman once praised for her emotional fluency becomes “difficult.” Her containment, once seductive, is labelled as instability. The very survival mechanisms that secured her desirability are reclassified as pathology. The sys- tem does not love wounded women; it loves disciplined wounds, wounds that do their work quietly. It loves pain that remains elegant, mute, and serviceable. A woman’s injury is tolerated only so long as it behaves.
I felt this in my own body: the way I over-functioned in situationships, the instinct to smooth tension before it could name itself, the quiet pride I took in being easy to love. Even before I understood it, I knew the cost, how often I swallowed what I needed before it reached my mouth, how reflexively I learned to disappear.
This produces a particularly chilling configuration. The ideal partner is not the one who challenges, but the one who integrates seamlessly into existing emotional infrastructure, or fails to. Desire becomes a strategy of insulation. Connection is permitted only when it does not disturb sovereignty. Intimacy becomes a curated environment, optimized for comfort and allergic to rupture.
That morning on the couch, my mom’s description of the blood-hardened heap of khakis in the corner of the den broke me. Unsure how to respond and knowing intimately that I am powerless over another person’s addiction, I told her there was nothing we could do. I logged us into an Al-Anon meeting, and we listened to strangers speak inelegantly about their long histories of fracture and resignation. The ritual steadied nothing. Afterward, feeling neither held nor contained, I sent her home and called my brother. We have to do something, he said. We have to at least try.
In the weeks that followed, I oscillated between raw confrontations with familiar, bone-deep pain and a kind of anesthetized avoidance. Simultaneously, the slow machinery of planning an intervention ground forward with merciless specificity. Five weeks of logistics masquerading as resolve: booking my brother’s flight from California to New York, threading the timing through childcare arrangements and school calendars, insurance inquiries, available beds, calling relatives I hadn’t spoken to in years, and asking them to write letters to a man they had quietly learned to avoid. The phone calls were excruciatingly polite, weighted with a forced intimacy no one actually wanted to perform. They told me stories about the charming, attentive man my father had once been, a version of him that never belonged to my memory. I found myself mourning not only the man he’d become but the man I’d never been granted access to.
Following the clinical outline of an intervention guide I found online, I began writing my own letter, meant to balance affection with consequence. My brother and I would read these to him aloud during the intervention. I hovered over the page, trying to locate warmth without falsification, honesty without cruelty. I was meant to begin with I love you, and stalled over the phrase, uncertain what it signified now: attachment, obligation, memory? It felt more like the residual reflex of lineage rehearsed through years of endurance. The language felt at once mandatory and alien, as though love itself had become a dialect I could recognize but no longer fluently speak.
One of the things I did to distract myself during those weeks between planning and intervening was swipe. Should you really be dating right now? a concerned friend asked me over the phone one afternoon as I recalled a recent mediocre date with the strained nonchalance of someone narrating from behind glass. Probably not, I said.
The night before the intervention, I opened the apps because the future felt briefly uninhabitable. Because my father’s deterioration required a counter-image of vitality. Because the brain demands something immediate when faced with the slow terror of powerlessness. If men were seeking wounded women as a form of emotional outsourcing, I was seeking intention itself, as if the appearance of romantic possibility might generate a sense that life still possessed narrative, that desire still had direction. What I wanted wasn’t sex, exactly, or even affection. I wanted the relief of being addressed. The small narcotic pleasure of designation. A “like” as proof of continued legibility.
The phone grew warm in my hand as I scrolled. A stranger’s face appeared, vanished. Another appeared. My thumb moved with calm precision, each swipe almost tender in its repetition. When someone matched with me, something tightened briefly behind my ribs before dissolving.
Here, Lauren Berlant’s phrase “cruel optimism” comes into quiet relevance. The apps offered the illusion of momentum, the feeling that intimacy could be summoned, that desire remained playable. To abstain would’ve been virtuous but also devastating. I wanted motion. I wanted something that mimicked hope.
And perhaps more uncomfortably still: somewhere inside that scrolling was the desire to be read as particular. Not just as a sexual unit, but as a woman of texture, history, intelligible scars. I deeply resented the fetishization of “daddy issues” while simultaneously knowing that my scar tissue had long been mistaken for sophistication, my restraint interpreted as depth, my quiet adaptation admired as emotional fluency. I’ve been praised for the very same qualities whose structural origins I now indict. To call this hypocrisy feels too neat. I stayed inside the choreography I claimed to see.
This is why moral purity feels hollow. The wounded woman is never merely victim but also participant and strategist, negotiating a terrain where desire and survival fold into one another with uneasy precision.
By the time my mom, brother, and I got to my parents’ house for the intervention, it was nearly noon. My father had already begun drinking. After we sat him down on the couch, my brother tried to pry the glass from his hand. My father looked into his eyes and growled, Don’t you take that away from me.
My father listened to our letters, and declared he would not stop. No detox. No rehab. No offers to attempt quitting on his own. He understood the stakes: he would lose his family. My mom, my brother, me, and my daughter, his only granddaughter.
When my mother finished packing, and I lifted the suitcase from the bedroom floor, he remained seated at the kitchen counter, playing solitaire on his iPad, the soft shuffle of digital cards filling the room with an eerie domestic calm. He didn’t have a glass in his hand. I noticed its absence, a detail that felt briefly meaningful, possibly imagined. He didn’t look up when we left.
We pulled out and drove slowly down the street. I booked the only lodging that would take us immediately, an expensive, temporary refuge that none of us questioned. We ate lunch at a small pizza place a few towns over, my mother afraid someone local might otherwise recognize this new version of her. The normalcy of eating—the slices, cups, napkins—felt grotesque.
The rental smelled of peppermint oil. Too clean, too careful. Everything was white. Temporary. We drank seltzers from my trunk and sat in silence, unable to settle into the fiction of rest. That evening, I watched my mother pick at curry chicken salad, the same plastic container she would return to all weekend, and wondered how long she’d survive on repetition and inertia.
The next morning, we spoke carefully about logistics. She would go back alone, try and talk my father into quitting again. My brother and I waited for two hours in my parked car outside a Starbucks, watching two men compliment one another’s motorcycles. When she finally called, it was to say my father had not changed his mind. She was packing a second suitcase.
When we returned to the house, my father stood outside, confused by the commotion. When we were ready to take my mom to her next encampment, a local hotel, I approached the kitchen counter where he had returned to his iPad, the same cards looping endlessly across the screen, and said, I hope this isn’t the last time I see you. He nodded.
As I turned away, I felt the quiet terror settle: the sense that the man I was speaking to had already begun disappearing, that whatever version of him still existed was retreating beyond reach. I felt anger too—sharp, childish, humiliating—that he still got to vanish while I stayed to manage what remained, to explain it, to clean around it.
I watched my mom drift through the lobby of the hotel, staring blankly at free magazines, as though novelty could soften abandonment. I slipped a mini candy bar from the concierge desk into her purse, a small reflex of caretaking I barely recognized.
My father could not imagine another way of living. And I, suspended between these visions of the wound, one decaying, the other fetishized, saw how female endurance is conscripted into the maintenance of male stasis.
Until intimacy is imagined not as containment but disturbance, not as smoothness but reckoning, the wounded woman will remain its ideal figure: available, absorbent, endlessly depleted.
In the days after the intervention, I threw myself into work with a focus that felt almost automatic. It was a skill I learned by watching my mother: how to fold crisis into productivity, how to keep my hands moving so my mind doesn’t wander into places I can’t afford to look. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to narrate anything. The future felt unusable, so I avoided it.
Each day, my father said no again. No to detox, no to rehab, no to any version of help. The repetition carried its own lethargic rhythm, a kind of refusal that no longer even needed inflection. My mother moved into a friend’s guest room, her belongings slowly redistributing themselves into temporary spaces. Sometimes she went back to the house to pay a bill or pick up another armful of clothes. She described these visits sparingly, as the details themselves were corrosive.
I kept waiting for some internal shift, grief sharpening into clarity or anger into resolve, but nothing organized itself. The days passed in the dull forward motion of ordinary life. I moved through them with a borrowed obedience, as though I were inhabiting a version of myself trained for exactly this kind of aftermath.
I found myself back on the apps, almost reflexively allowing myself to imagine futures with strangers, despite knowing how thin that promise is. It felt like funneling the hope I lost for my father into the projection of another man. This irrational, faintly humiliating gesture is the persistent belief that connection might still repair something I can’t seem to name. Which is to say, I kept offering the wound they were waiting to use.
What happens next is its own blank. There’s no imminent turn, no lesson cohering at the edges. Just the knowledge that something has broken open in a way that won’t easily reseal, and the quiet fact that all of us are improvising around a future none of us can yet imagine.
Erin Williams is a writer exploring desire, embodiment, illness, and intimate life. She is at work on a book of essays.