The Damage Only a Father Can Do

I remember my father narrating stories to my mother it always ended in her loud bursts of laughter. I loved those moments, it was exciting. Often he planted kisses on her belly which felt like tickles to me.

He would sing she would dance, we were happy I grew knowing I was a product of their love. Some time during pregnancy everything changed. I couldn’t feel my father’s presence, the atmosphere I got accustomed to was gone.

It was suddenly just my mother and me. She was left to either keep the child of a man that was unfit to father or end a life eager to live. She chose the latter. She allowed me life and that choice came at a price, a price so high I couldn’t repay even if I wanted.

As I grew in her womb I heard her sobs and felt her pain. She longed for a stable home, a father for me, a husband for her perhaps two or three more children to complete the family. See my mother was her daddy’s girl so she felt cheated that I was robbed of a father’s love and this is what broke her.

Her resentment dug roots of bitterness deep in her heart. Her pain became mine so I knew heartache, the sting of abandonment and the harshness of life before I was born.

The day I was born I felt my mother’s fear, I was a girl and the spitting image of my father. I thought she feared I would be a walking memory of a time she so wished to forget. Instead, she feared that being a girl my self-worth would be tied to men in a quest to find a surrogate father. In trying to protect me from her worst nightmare she tried her best to play the role of a father while desperately searching for one that could.

Often she would sit and stare at me. I wondered what she thought, only later I learned during those moments she was crippled by fear. She feared I would hate her for choosing an unfit father and for making me what I am a bastard child.

My father’s absence affected my mother more than it did me, she spent a better part of her years trying to fight fate. Her motivates were out of fear and not love so we mostly ended up with opportunists, narcissists, and deadbeats. But her love for me was so strong that when she sensed I was in danger we would pack up and leave without a second thought.

One day as a teenager I went to the park to meet a friend. I saw a father with her daughter playing ball nearby was a picnic basket. They seemed genuinely happy the bond between them was real something nurtured for years. Everything was effortless, the love between them was palpable.

I teared up and left. I wondered why my father couldn’t love me, what was so bad about me that he rejected his role as my father. I couldn’t hate my father to me he was imaginary, I couldn’t hate my mother she was too dear to me.

But wait, I was the reason my father left I was the reason he couldn’t love me. This is when my self-hate and self-sabotaged began, a fate my mother feared and fought for many years.

I spent a better part of a year in this state through it all my mother was there loving me unconditionally. While hoping and praying that somehow I would free myself from this hell.

Even though we had years to prepare for this, nothing could have prepared us for its reality. It was much harder than either of us could have imagined. There was nothing my mother or anyone would have said to me to get me out. I had to find my way, what saved me was my mother’s love.

A father may turn his back on his child, but a mother`s love endures through all-Washington Irving

When I doubted my worth and blamed myself for everything that failed. My mother’s love reminded me of my worth and everything I did right. Her love reminded me of the choice she made to give me life and to stand by me no matter what. That awareness pulled me out of my hell.

I was suddenly open to see that my father’s rejection could offer me a powerful gift or cause me suffering. That’s when I researched abandonment and childhood trauma learned that the fear that tormented us all these years was just a projection and that the future could be anything. I learned to let go of the story of how life could have been if he was around and the guilt I felt for being born.

I found that my father’s rejection and mother’s love molded the best parts of my character. I value friendship and the responsibility we have for each person. I know compassion and how love can heal. I can help people who feel abandoned, rejected or unloved. Most of all I learned forgiveness and I am finally free from my past.

If you interested in how I navigated the process of forgiving you may read about it here.

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