The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss

by Anderson Cooper

“I suspect that being fatherless leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.” That is the full quote from Mary Gordon’s novel The Company of Women, and when I came across it, I knew it to be the foundation of my life. It explained countless actions I’d taken thoughtlessly. Unbeknownst to me, my life decisions had been based on this principle. Even now that my eyes have been opened, they still are. For a long time I couldn’t identify the impact of my father’s absence; it’s taken me years to see it, but now it is all so clear. Looking back, I see time and time again that decisions I made, impulses I followed, and the kind of men I was attracted to all stemmed from my not having a father. I used to imagine that my father had left me a letter, or a series of letters that would be delivered at key junctures of my life. I still hold out hope that one will show up.