This may help or frustrate you, but some girlfriends and I have what we call the 4D experiences. 4D stands for 'Disappointed Dad / Disappointing Daughters.' Our dads are our dads, and we love them, but we also recognise that we are, as their daughters, for them, a reflection of their world, not independent entities. One gamer friend calls us 'non-player characters.' Some of our 4D features:
1. Slight slights. Anything short of full validation of our dad is perceived as a deliberate slight on our part. Such behaviour can be an action like living abroad or an opinion that you may or may not share but does not allow you to demonstrate complete agreement with your father when he asserts himself, often randomly. For the most part, we try not to acknowledge this dynamic because what's the point? It will change nothing and turn us into the family villain because Dad is now agitated 'due to' our lack of full, unquestioning validation.
2. Male-centred Moms. We don't, for the most part, blame our mothers for this. Again, what's the point? For various external and internal, pragmatic and existential reasons, our moms have built their lives around filtering the world to make it make sense for our fathers. Our moms may have done their best to raise independent daughters, but they themselves can't imagine life without the man they've come to dedicate their lives to caring for, in all the ways one can use the verb 'care.' Most of our moms want something different for us, in theory, but they aren't going to intervene in the Daddy-daughter dynamic. Dad's reactions are always treated as, if not superior, perfectly reasonable, so, as daughters, we're expected to find a way to accept and respect that when interacting with family.
3. Bemused brothers. Our brothers need help understanding what the issue is. Boys in this dynamic are allowed, up to specific limitations, to disagree with their fathers in a demonstration of independence. They can even intervene on behalf of a sister. However, it must be a brotherly intervention; Dad can't take such intervention from us or sustain the intervention when the brother is not around. While the brother is permitted autonomy - a positive male quality in our dad's world- we daughters reflect our dad. We are not autonomous individuals. We are expected to reflect his moral authority, not deflect it.
4. Sympathetic sisters. For the most part, we are older sisters or without sisters. Our younger sisters have learned to present themselves more effectively than us. After all, disappointment tends to follow difficulty; our sisters saw our fathers react to us as though we were problems, aka 'difficult' daughters, and understandably, our sisters like to avoid the 'difficult' label. Our sisters desire to want, say, and do the right things in front of our father so that, in comparison with us, he can feel he has produced a non-difficult daughter. Our sisters aren't always what he thinks they are, but in binary thinking, which is endemic to this sort of dad, a disappointing daughter must be balanced by a non-disappointing one. While this dynamic complicates sister relationships, it also doesn't. Our sisters are not trying to hurt us; they are trying to get along with Dad. We failed, so they didn't do what we did.
5. Righteous or wronged. When we manage an intentional or unintentional 'slight slight', our dads react as either righteous—full of examples of how we are objectively incorrect and our poor behaviour or ideas need to be dominated and overcome—or wronged—hurt by our cruel rejection and quick to point out to us and others how we have failed to be dutiful daughters/citizens/people.
6. Structural sanctions. Because Dad is right and his worldview correct, he is either righteous (vindicated by external conditions) or wronged (unfairly martyred by his ignorant moral inferiors). Dad must arrange for the world to sanction our misalignment to reinforce this understanding for himself and others. This is really important to him and his self-image, so he does it not to punish us so much as to safeguard himself. For some of us DDs (disappointing daughters), this means ghosting; for others, it's angry online or offline outbursts to which 'we have driven' him because he is not responsible for managing his own emotions - that's women's work; sometimes, it's cutting us out of an inheritance or family activities and conversations, talking about us as a heavenly appointed cross he must bear to demonstrate his tolerance and worthiness, etc. The point is that he is not rejecting us; It is, in fact, our fault. The world is rejecting us and, in doing so, justifying him.
7. Good-time gaslighting. When things are going well, our dads do not see or hear us. They, often with the help of our moms, filter our words and actions only to accept interpretations satisfactory to their worldview. It's almost as if we are spectators to an entirely different reality in which someone who looks and sounds like us is the avatar of the daughter our father believes he deserves. Sometimes, this is relaxing, but there is an undercurrent of cartesian self-doubt. Maybe this is his world, and we just can't accept our place within it?
I think your reaction is the one many of us choose. We want our dads in our lives for reasons that are not always easy to put into words. However, we still want to be our own person, and that's somehow offensive to our fathers for reasons they can't put into words. I don't know if this is an accurate description of your experience or your dad's. People are very complex and different; we often don't know why we are the way we are. But I hope this conveys a sense of not being alone, of having other daughters who are also trying and often failing to be what their dads need while also being who they are. I guess we keep trying.
