My daughter was sick last night.
She woke me at 2 A.M. needing her
dad. She has been trying a new medication and it made her terribly nauseated.
She’s nineteen. She knows how to take care of herself when something like this
happens. But she still needed her dad to get her downstairs to the couch, get
her some water, and feel her forehead with the back of his hand. She needed to
be reminded that she isn’t alone.
In truth…I needed this too.
We’ve been here in Lynchburg for
three and a half years now. That’s the longest uninterrupted period of living
in the same house that we’ve had since she was born. Her mom left when Daisy
was only eighteen months old. From that point on, it was once a week and every
other weekend and two months in the summer. Even the two months were broken up
with her mom having my visitation schedule.
I never fully felt like a dad. I
felt like my entire fatherhood was broken into bits and pieces, like Morse
code. Dot, dot, dot…dash, dash, dash…dot, dot, dot. The thirteen years between
our divorce and her moving here with me felt like I was lost at sea, trying
desperately to swim against the tide, struggling beneath the waves and only
catching a gasping breath whenever she was with me and I could breathe. As soon
as I’d take her back to her mom’s, I’d disappear under the turbulent waters
again. Drowning. Sinking.
I came across a picture on
Facebook yesterday. It popped up on that “Your memories From ____ Years Ago”
thing. It was my daughter back home at St. Anthony’s Italian Festival. She was
nine years old, smiling brightly, clutching a stuffed penguin she’d won at some
midway game and waiting to get on the Ferris Wheel with me.
Smiling.
My daughter doesn’t smile much
now. She stopped smiling and being a bubbly, outgoing, happy kid when her mom’s
second husband took off his mask of decency and showed the monster he really
is. From age twelve, until we escaped Nashville and moved here to Lynchburg
when she was sixteen, she endured mental and physical abuse enough to drive
that bubbly, smiling girl into hiding. He wore her down with every kind of
cruelty. He killed her pet. He destroyed her property, including things I gave
her on birthdays and holidays. Things shared between a daddy and his little
girl. Notes I would include in birthday cards. He would “edit” them and mark
them up. He intruded on my fatherhood every chance he got. He stopped short of
sexual assault –or he’d be a missing person on the back of a milk carton right
now—but everything else was on the table in his sick mind.
Her mom did nothing to stop this.
She was too concerned with her own life. She often sided with her husband,
against our daughter, in order to keep the peace. She essentially sacrificed
Daisy’s well-being, for her own.
It finally got bad enough and I
took a job in Virginia and she left with me. She escaped the remnants of her
childhood.
This was not the life I wanted
for my child. Or for me. I wanted a happy home and a house and peace. I wanted
my daughter to be healthy and happy and to reach her potential. I wanted to be
the best dad anyone ever had, and to experience fatherhood from the adult side
and hopefully make up for how fatherhood looked from the child’s view that I
had when I was her age. Instead I got sawdust fatherhood. The fragments that
remain after the whole has been cut into pieces, again and again until nothing
remains but the shavings and dust that stand as evidence that there really was
something there once.
All of which brings me to last
night. There are a lot of men who would be upset over losing a half night’s
sleep with a sick nineteen-year-old child. “I have to work in the morning.” “I
get up at 4:45 am!” “You’re an adult, you can take care of yourself.”
And she can.
But there were so many times over
those thirteen years, when she was sick, and hurting, and often in real danger,
and I couldn’t help her. My fragmented time with her leaves me aching for those
days when she was that smiling little nine-year-old girl in the photo. Times
when I would have loved nothing more than to have carried her downstairs to the
couch, felt her forehead with the back of my hand, and stroked her hair until
she fell asleep.
But I had to settle for phone
calls and five days a month.
So, I don’t mind when she needs
me now. I don’t rue the lost sleep or the groggy feeling when the alarm went
off this morning at 4:45 and I was seriously thinking of taking a sick day.
This would have been my life a dozen years ago, and instead it’s my life now. I’m
okay with that. It’s what dads do. Good ones anyway.
I nurse her back to health daily
as it is. Back to emotional health. I’ve laid the back of my hand to her
forehead and felt the cold, clammy feeling of a broken spirit. I’ve comforted
the tears and frustration that she’s cried over the neglect and indifference
that her mom has shown, both while she was being so abused in her mom’s home,
and especially since we’ve moved here. They don’t talk much. Her mom has been
here once in almost four years, and that was a brief, overnight visit. Nineteen-year-old
women process that as abandonment. That’s because it is abandonment. I’ve held
her hand as she’s been nauseated in her soul over the childhood she lost. Over
the time we missed together. I’m doing my best to nurse her back to health.
So, no…I don’t mind losing half a
night of sleep to take care of my adult daughter. Because in truth, nursing her
back to health is also nursing me back. Every chance I get to act like the dad
I am inside, goes a long way toward healing the loss I’ve felt over the years
after the divorce. And maybe, to heal the loss I felt long before that, in the
deep hole that existed in my own heart, because of my own father and his
abandonment.
I’ve never felt his hand on my
fevered forehead. Never heard his voice speak in the soft tones that dads use
when their child is sick. Never felt his fingers brush my hair aside or his
lips kiss my forehead as I drifted off to sleep, comforted in my illness by the
presence of a loving, caring father.
I know what it means to my
daughter, because I needed it too.
I could have quit. During those
hard years after our divorce when my heart broke daily because I missed my
daughter so much, and those five brief days each month were not even remotely
enough to assuage my pain.
I could have packed it in when I
lost my career in 2008 and had to live in my car because there was no work. I
could have left to find a job somewhere else and just dutifully sent money and
called once a week.
But I stayed. I stayed, and kept
her trust, even though I was so limited in my ability to act on that trust. I
stayed. And when the time came that she could take no more and had to get away…I
was still there, ready to take her out of that hell and move her to safety.
You dads who are reading this,
(it’s posted on both my personal website and my divorced dads blog) I encourage
you not to quit. I encourage you to look squarely at the hell you must endure,
stiffen your shoulders, brush aside your tears, and stand your ground.
Take whatever your ex, her
husband, and the courts throw at you and stand your ground. The day will come.
The day will come when the only knight left in the kingdom who can slay the
dragon that pursues your child…is you. If you aren’t there –even with battered
armor and a rusty sword—the dragon wins.
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Never, never let that happen.
