Cheryl Strayed and her father

Cheryl Strayed and her father are bound together by a contradiction that structures her account of childhood: she loved him intensely even as his conduct made home frightening, and after her parents’ divorce the father she had feared losing became largely absent. The relationship did not resolve through reunion. Instead, its meaning changed over time, shaped by her mother’s effort to protect the children without asking them to deny their love, and by Strayed’s eventual recognition of what her father’s absence meant to her.

Family Background and the Marriage

Cheryl Strayed’s father got Cheryl Strayed’s mother pregnant when they were both nineteen. They were not very much in love, but abortion was illegal, and Cheryl Strayed’s mother was unwilling to leave for a home for wayward girls and give up her baby. The two married quickly. Over the next nine years, they had three children. Strayed recalls that hard things happened during those years and describes her father as often violent and mean; she keeps the account focused on the effect of that household rather than detailing every painful incident.

The marriage ended when Strayed was six. She regards her mother’s decision to divorce as probably the single best thing that happened to her, a judgment that coexists with her childhood terror at the prospect of losing her father. Her mother’s departure could protect the children from the destructive family life they had known, but it could not make Strayed stop loving him or remove the grief of his absence.

Love, Fear, and Separation

Strayed remembers her attachment to her father as immense and involuntary. She hated what he did to her mother, her siblings, and her, and she cried, hid, and experienced distress that showed itself in headaches and bedwetting. Still, she could not imagine not loving him. When her mother finally left, Strayed begged her to return, believing that the end of the marriage would mean she no longer had a father. In an important sense, that fear came true: after the divorce, she says, she no longer had a dad.

She saw him only three times after the separation, in brief visits associated with events she calls sad and creepy, without explaining them further. For much of her childhood, his absence was simply a fact of life. She lived in inexpensive apartment buildings among other children of single mothers, many of whom also had little contact with their fathers. The family’s limited correspondence could briefly raise hope: a letter bearing her father’s handwriting would arrive for the children, and she and her siblings opened it eagerly. But the letters were not messages of connection. They were vulgar attacks on their mother, including threats that he would take the children and make their mother regret it.

The threats left Strayed afraid that her father might kidnap her and her siblings. She repeatedly imagined how they would escape and return to their mother, even if that meant crossing the country on foot, following rivers, hiding, and finding food and clothing along the way. The imagined journey reveals how thoroughly the threat entered her childhood: though he never took them, she prepared in her mind to get them home.

Their Mother’s Mediation

Cheryl Strayed’s mother did not speak ill of Cheryl Strayed’s father to the children, despite having ample reason to hate him. That restraint did not mean pretending that nothing bad had happened. She and the children spoke openly about what they had witnessed and suffered, while she presented him as human: flawed and complicated, but not beyond the possibility of redemption. Her approach allowed Strayed to retain love for a father who had hurt the family without requiring her to treat that love as proof that the harm was acceptable.

This position mattered in ordinary family conversations as well as at moments of crisis. When Strayed asked as a child what had made her mother fall in love with him, her mother found things to tell her, even when she could no longer remember them clearly. As a teenager, Strayed argued with her mother over her refusal to condemn him. Her mother answered that she was grateful for him because, without him, she would not have had her children. Near the end of her life, when she knew she was going to die, she stroked Strayed’s hair and told her she could reach out to him again. Openness to forgiveness, reconciliation, or change, she said, would not betray her mother; it would reflect the person she had raised.

Strayed also recalls a separate example of her father’s interference with her mother’s life. Her mother loved reading and had long wanted to attend college. When she took a night class while Strayed was very young, her father became enraged and cut her textbook into pieces with scissors. Her mother dropped the class. The episode shows the consequences of his destructiveness beyond the couple’s relationship: it also obstructed a pursuit that mattered to her mother.

Absence, Recognition, and Aftermath

When Strayed was twenty-seven, she understood with sudden clarity that her father had never intended to take the children and had never wanted her. The realization brought immediate sobbing. It gave a new meaning to the old letters and kidnapping fears: what she had experienced as a possible struggle over keeping the children was not evidence that he wanted to father them. This recognition did not erase her childhood love. Rather, it exposed the grief beneath her long-held hope that his absence might still turn into a relationship.

Her mother’s influence continued after her death. Strayed describes her mother’s words and conduct as a bridge across the wounds her father had made, enabling her to begin healing. That legacy was especially consequential because her mother had not asked her to choose between loyalty to the family and love for her father. The relationship could therefore be faced as it was: damaged and marked by absence, but not reducible to a simple story of hatred.

The continuing bond with her mother is made tangible through memory and ordinary objects. Several months after her mother died, Strayed found a glass jar of stones that she and her siblings had given her as children. She had hoped, briefly, that holding the jar might feel like holding her mother, but she came to understand that no object could restore her. More than twenty years after the death, the stones her own children gave her had replaced those she once gave her mother; she kept favored stones in her pockets and sometimes carried one for weeks. These memories do not directly reunite her with her father. They show instead how the mother who had helped her survive his absence remained present in the work of understanding it.

Significance of the Relationship

Strayed’s account resists two easy conclusions: that a child can simply stop loving a harmful parent, or that preserving love requires excusing that parent. Her childhood attachment, fear, and grief coexist with her recognition of her father’s destructiveness. Her mother’s honesty and refusal to demonize him helped keep those truths in view at once, while her later encouragement left room for possible reconciliation without making it an obligation.

The relationship’s lasting consequence is therefore not a reported reunion but a changed capacity to reckon with the past. Strayed credits her mother’s example with forming a bridge toward healing; the father remains largely absent from the life she describes. What endures is the difficult distinction her story preserves between loving someone, acknowledging the harm they caused, and deciding what can be carried forward.