Bear with me as I tell you something about Fathers and death, being young and not recognizing love when it is in front of your face.
Because it was there in front of me a long time ago. Driving a car sober, unlike my stepdad or my best friend’s dad who used to get lost taking me home. He had only taken me home about 100 times before he’d hit the bottle again.
But this sober father was talking to me about children and adoption and I was becoming indignant enough not to want to listen anymore because I knew more than him. And he loved me enough to let the conversation float away through the open window.
Bear with me, I’m trying to tell you about fathers and love, but the memories spin by in my head faster than my fingers can type.
I’m trying to tell you about the kind of father who didn’t laugh when I told him that I believed Noah lived to 900 years old. Who instead quietly nodded his head and then sat back with a funny grin on his face while I laid out my argument which was only half coherent.
And beamed up at me on my wedding day, clapping me on the back and dancing and laughing so much I thought he might explode. Who broke the hospital rules to see me just before I gave birth to his first grand baby, swooping in just as the nurse covered me up. He was so happy he couldn’t resist.
But I was young and indignant and lonely and scared so his actions made me angry which made my husband feel he had to yell at this man who loved me so much he just wanted to give me a blessing.
What I’m trying to write to you is about love and girls who grow up without fathers and fathers who understand that and try to love those girls as their own daughters. Men who can love so deeply that an uppity, broken loveless young woman can’t take their joy, nor can she become unworthy of this love even when her exhausted self storms away after arguing about the baby.
Bear with me because if you do you will hear about a father who patiently folded a broken woman into his arms of never ending love and held on to her until she saw for the first time that the word ‘father’ was not a dirty word. Nor an empty word.
But it is a lovely word.