Father’s Day

Reading all the loving tributes to fathers yesterday on social media I couldn’t help but feel mixed emotions. Happy for those who have such loving men in their lives, those who have been guided throughout life by good men who taught them how to be self-assured, learned, and able to navigate in the world as adults. They were messages of love and gratitude. There were tributes to fathers who have passed, sweet childhood memories reflected on, and photos shared of happy times. There were messages of gratitude about men who stepped in to be surrogate fathers.

And I wished I could do that as well. But it was not my experience with the father that gave me life. Our relationship was one of control and manipulation. Love and respect were absent even when we called out to please be present.

The father I had might have been doing the best he could raising two daughters. He might have been parenting the way his own father did. Or he might have just been that individual who was more self-involved and needing to be in control of his own life that he placed me and my sister at the bottom of the list of what needed attention and care. He left the parenting to our mother, but when he didn’t like something he stepped into the “I’m your father” mode and made his presence felt.

My father, like everyone, made mistakes in his life but never admitted to any of them, never tried to make an apology or seek forgiveness. He did his best to keep us small so that in comparison his own life looked larger, bigger, more important. He belittled our attempts and our dreams and sadly, because at one time we looked up to him, we believed him.

And the day came that broke his daughters’ faith in him as a man to be admired, to be listened to, to learn from. We learned that he was never going to be someone we could rely on other than to put food on the table, give us a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs.

It caused me to break from him completely to save myself and to create a future where I learned to be a father to myself. It wasn’t easy and it took many years. I’ve often thought it might be the reason I became the mother of sons, not daughters. That it was a gift for me to break chains to raise good men who know what it would mean to raise another generation with the ability to make mistakes, and to own those mistakes. But to live their lives with love, with respect and with the ability to give those things to others rather than simply make their way through life by taking.

Circumstances in life can and will present us with challenges where we face hurdles and dead ends from time to time. If we’re lucky we learn how to make our way around, over and through obstacles even if we’ve never had the role model we wanted and deserved to teach us how to do that.