Loving Ourselves By Loving Our Imperfect Fathers
Happy belated Father's day to anyone who is a father or who has one or has had one!
My relationship with my with my father was rocky at best. I share this story not because I need sympathy, but because it was only through my experience,or lack thereof, with my father that I am the person who I am today. Let me paint the picture > my father was a loving, caring man from what I remember. But, the one thing he couldn't overcome in his life was his addiction to alcohol, which is what resulted in my parents divorce at the age of 5 years old. My brother and I returned to Ohio after spending our younger years living in the West Village.
My father's presence in my life began to wain as the years passed and annual birthday phone calls and the occasional congratulations card in the mail stopped. He was not a part of my childhood so I spent most of my adolescence and young adult years without knowing him, who he was and what he looked life was foreign to me. It wasn't until my late twenties that I began to take an interest in knowing where he was and what he was doing. As you can imagine, I had lots of questions and even more anxiety. So, what did I do? I partnered with a private investigator and located his whereabouts. I began to write him and we started a very preliminary relationship after 20 years!
It was a short lived relationship as I took it upon myself to show up where he worked unannounced as I knew if we planned a meet up it was highly likely he wouldn't show or commit. It was a very surreal experience and our conversation that day lasted about 45 minutes. I left thinking there was hope to reconcile and start a meaningful father/son relationship. It didn't happen!
So, through it all what I was left with was trying to reconcile why HE made the decisions he did. Why he chose to not be present in my life or the life of my brother? How he felt or believed that we were better off without him in our lives? Or, the most telling, was how we would never know the love of his own two children. This thought for me was the most profound and brought me to an understanding that he was a product of his own life experiences and beliefs and that he must have been living with so much unresolved pain. It was through this inner dialogue that I was able to start my own process of healing and letting go of the limiting beliefs I was telling myself and that were prohibiting me from fully loving myself. You don't have to hold onto these stories either. It really is a powerful choice that each of us have in this life.
Each moment describes who you are, and gives you the opportunity to decide if that's who you want to be. - iPEC
Learn more about what it means to decide if that’s who you want to be! Click HERE
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