It's 3 AM and I can't sleep. I went to see my Dad today and I always come away with a mishmash of emotional hoohah after being with him. Explaining is difficult. Basically, he left my mother and his family and married another family. That family became HIS family and we were...well that's the part that I have never been able to mash about the hah. I have never been able to define what I am to him. He is no help in that dept. Big revelation on that today and now I am in a struggle between the response I WANT to have and feel I have a RIGHT to have, and the one I know God wants me to have. I am not sure I am that big a person. So the following is what I would like to say to my Father:
Dear Father,
My perspective of you has always been a selfish one. I was still a little girl when you left home and where you are concerned, I have remained that little girl. She has always felt abandoned by you and without the knowledge of what the love of a man should look like. She has always been jealous of your "other" family and felt that they had you and she didn't.
Well, after today I see that perception was wrong, but not unfounded. That little girl is gone and while she does have a father, she does not have a Dad. Your "other" family is not your other family, they are your family and you are their Dad. They have had you more years than I and know you as their Dad where as I do not.
They have more of a right to be jealous of you than I do. Even though through the eyes of that little girl who you left at the age of 10, you should be MY Dad and I should have a right to be more jealous. I guess I finally got a glimpse of what they feel.
So for their sake and for mine, I release you. I release you to be their Dad and not mine. I release you from any emotional duty you have felt toward me and me from any I feel toward you. They already have the financial responsibility for you so I release them from any financial obligation they may feel toward me. I want nothing from you or them, in return, I give nothing. From this point forward, I withhold any pity I may have for you. You are now what you have always really been to me...a stranger.
Sincerely,
Me
However, I cannot send this to him. God tells me that the pity I feel for him is placed on my heart so that I will honor my father in spite of the lack of relationship. I am not his responsibility and he is not mine, but the genes are there and I must honor that. I do however feel that while I need to be kind, I don't feel God is going to make me continue to try to have a relationship with the man. I only feel that God wants me to continue to visit him since he is lonely. He can't hear me and he doesn't stop talking long enough for me to get a word in edgewise so all I can really do is sit and listen. It hurts cause he always badmouths my mother and talks incessantly about his stepkids, but I need to be there so he can feel that there is something between us at the end of his life.
I take comfort in the fact that he will really KNOW in the next life. He is just a man right now and like I have always seen this from my limited perspective, he can only do the same. My hope for any revelations in this life are gone. Oh I have prayed for them, but God has this funny way of letting me be the one that gets the revelations instead of my father.
Funny that I always feel like a child when I go see him. So excited and hopeful that THIS time will be the time when we reconnect and my Dad sees ME...sees my heart. I come away sad, and reflective, but a little more grown up each time. I feel like rather than creating bonds, God has been severing ties...little, by painful little. I wish He would let me cut the last one so that when the man is gone, I can be released from the pain of it. But I know He won't. There is a lesson yet to be learned. I just don't know what it is.
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