Making Peace With My Father’s Rejection
One of the more difficult parts of my life has been my relationship with my Father. Born on November 22, 1942 in the Bronx, NY, my Father grew up poor and dreamed of one day being a great success. Determined not be like his Father who was dependent on his Brother (my Dad’s Uncle) – who employed him at his butter factory – and nourished by his Mother’s love, my Father did indeed make a great success of his life in the terms that he understood it.
After studying accounting at CCNY and going to law school at Brooklyn Law, my Father took a job with a real estate investment company in Sharon Heights, Menlo Park in the early 1970s. Mentored by his boss, Robert McNeil, my Father learned the real estate game and struck out on his own a few years later when he felt like he was ready.
His timing couldn’t have been better. The Silicon Valley was just starting its long trajectory as the world economy’s innovation capital and the rents for the office and apartment buildings my Father bought increased in parallel with its growth. The properties’ value logically followed and my parents became quite wealthy.
They bought a house in the Las Piedras area of Portola Valley and then 123 Pinon Drive in 1990 – when I was 13. We were members of The Alpine Hills Tennis & Swim Club where I spent much of time as a child and adolescent playing tennis, including short court, and basketball.
In the Summer of 1989, I was the #1 player for Alpine Hills 12-and-under team which won the Northern California club championships at San Jose State, sending us to Fresno to play for the Gar Glenny Cup, the state championship. In the finals against Courtside of Los Gatos, I beat the formidable Justin Heindel at #1 singles 6-2, 6-2 – serving underhand due to a pectoral injury.
In Fresno, Southern California was represented by Cabrillo Racquet Club. Cabrillo was coached by Wayne Bryan, the father of the identical twins Mike and Bob Bryan who played #1 and #2 for Cabrillo and would go on to become the greatest doubles team in professional tennis history winning 16 grand slams. My task would be to face Mike Bryan, the #1 player in the country. With nothing to lose, I gave Mike everything I could before going down 6-2 6-2 in a match that was more competitive than the score. I was proud of myself to have gone toe to toe with the best player in the country.
But injuries and anxiety riddled my early adolescence and threw my budding athletic career – I also played basketball – off course. My Father – who had been heavily involved in my athletic career – didn’t understand what was happening and lost faith in me. It was the end of the loving relationship of my childhood and the beginning of a long and tumultuous rocky phase. As I began to spiral in high school and college, my Father distanced himself even more. When we were driving back from UC San Diego after my freshman year he told me that he had previously “given up” on me. I was only 19.
When my parents got divorced at the end of 2002 – when I was 25 – the relationship took another turn for the worse. In Philosophy graduate school at UC – Davis, I was struggling with Chronic Fatigue and chose not to be a Teaching Assistant my second year (2004-05). This was unacceptable to my Father who wrote me an email titled “Support” stating that his financial support of me would be conditional on working for money to his satisfaction. When I protested my health, he wouldn’t listen.
As I approached 40 and appeared to have overcome the problems that had haunted me since adolescence, I proposed to my Father that he hire me to come work for him part time at his real estate investment company, The Feirman Corporation. I started on November 1, 2016. At first, it went brilliantly. We worked together in his suite in his office building on Main Street in Los Altos. Whenever I had a question, I could pop into his office. Frequently we would chat in his office about the real estate business. Frequently we would walk to lunch together at The Boulangerie or Mikado. It was the best time of our adult relationship and my Father called it “a dream come true”.
Sadly, it was not to last. I was seeing a psychiatrist I did not care for who had me on 2 mg Abilify per day. When he told me late in 2017 that he would no longer be seeing part time patients, I decided to taper off the Abilify on my own. I did so too quickly and it threw me completely out of whack. I couldn’t function. The quality of my work suffered greatly and I was no longer meeting my Father’s standards. I was truly in a fight for my life. Therefore, it hurt even more when my Father sent me an email firing me and telling me not to come into the office any more. Clearly he cared more about his business than my life.
After two brutal years, I began to pull my life together. I visited my father at his estate in Woodside in April 2021 with my girlfriend Li after a trip together to Carmel By The Sea. I was at the top of my game and feeling great. But my Dad and I got into an argument about the role of luck in success. I said that his success was a function of talent and hard work but also of being in the right place at the right time (i.e. luck). He didn’t care much for this line of argument. As EB White said: “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of a self made man.” To make matters worse, my Dad turned to Li and asked her who she thought was right. She deflected it beautifully but I was furious with him for putting her on the spot like that.
Leading up to Thanksgiving 2021, my Father and I got together periodically and I was planning to attend Thanksgiving at his estate with my new girlfriend Rachel. However, thinking back to what had happened with Li, I changed my mind. My Father was furious. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he insisted. But I didn’t trust him with my budding relationship and and stuck to my position.
That initiated a cold war in which we didn’t speak for about a year. When I reached out to him with a letter, he responded with a nasty string of text messages blaming me for everything. But I wasn’t in the mood for it and responded in kind. Having tried so hard to make the relationship work for so long, I was no longer in the frame of mind to always be the one reaching out and trying to make it work. My Father hadn’t made much effort since the divorce so my new stance effectively ended our relationship.
I have only seen my Father once since late 2021. It was a chance encounter at the Sharon Heights shopping center in Menlo Park in April 2024. I had just finished eating a sandwich at Eric’s and was driving away when I noticed a car that looked like his. When I pulled closer, I saw his personal license plate and honked at him to get his attention. He was rummaging furiously through the back seat of his Mercedes SUV and I couldn’t get his attention. But I kept honking. Eventually he acknowledged me, I parked and we had a nice exchange for a few minutes. I asked him why he hadn’t replied to my recent letter and he gave a weak excuse. I later realized that he had also seen me but was pretending not to by rummaging through the back of his car and not hearing my honks. That was the last time I saw my 83-year old Father.
When I read a review of Joshua Coleman’s Rules of Engagement in the WSJ about parents who want to reconcile with children who have cut them out of their lives, I bought a copy and subsequently contacted Coleman. I explained to him that my Father had cut me out of his life and I wanted to make one last attempt to re-engage. But his rate was $1000/hour and I ultimately decided that I’d made enough attempts to make the relationship with my Father work. A relationship takes two people and my Father had made it abundantly clear that he had little interest in one with me.
While my difficulties with my Father’s criticisms of me were very painful when I was younger, as I got older and gained perspective I began to realize that a big part of the problem was him. Who gives up on their kid when they’re still a teenager? His view of himself is so high and his philosophy of accumulating as much wealth as possible at odds with my own that I began to understand that I was never going to be good enough for him.
It was a long journey but I’d finally made my peace with my failed relationship with my Father. While I wish we had some sort of relationship, I have no regrets because I know that I did everything in my power to make it work. Even if I never see him again, I’m thankful for the Father he was to me as a child and to the opportunities his success afforded me and I wish him all the best. Further, given his lack of respect for me, it’s probably best for me not to have any relationship with him anyways.
