A Daddy For ME

We were born to a man who did but perhaps should never have sired children.

My sister and I, his first children.

Our parents met when they were both very young themselves. My mother, a girl of eighteen years in her first job as a teacher. My father, nineteen, and a teacher as well.

Characteristically male he would provide the necessary DNA for several of us. To me, he is my ‘sire’ not to be confused with ‘father or daddy’. The word father or daddy is a right I feel…he has never earned.

A male, who by all accounts is cognitively brilliant…yet emotionally defunct.

Our parents were married when they were nineteen and twenty respectively. Both parents were academically gifted, but my father I’m told was meted out a large portion of the gift of intelligence coupled with a photographic memory.

An extraordinary human when it came to affairs of the mind. In affairs of the heart, however, he proved to be woefully inept.

Our parents would separate when I was three and one half years old and my sister in utero.

We had the love of all our relatives, especially my sister, as she was the baby. We did not have a nuclear family. We grew up with my bonus mom and my aunts and uncles who we came to regard as our siblings.

Absentee dad

We have never had a daddy to love us! We knew it, we saw it, we were told it…and we felt this loss profoundly, then and now!

A daddy loves and shapes the hearts and lives of his children, especially his daughters. He teaches her many things including what qualities to seek in a mate later in life.

In his role as head of household, provider, protector, and lover of family, my father flunked monumentally. He was emotionally and geographically distant, a womanizer, and a perennial nomad.

He would reappear intermittently throughout the years often not even recognizing my sister when he did. I had the distinct blessing or curse of being almost identical in features.

A solitary gift — DNA

This likeness earned me some referential ridicule as a child. I would inadvertently be the villain in his story. After all, we bore a striking resemblance, and someone had to take the fall.

Navigating the jungle of my teenage years, I yearned for the love of a father. My friends had their dads but we never did. This deficit planted the seeds of inadequacy within me that remains a constant ‘work in progress’.

The developing psyche undernourished by love and empowerment validations leaves a young mind open to many other often damaging influences. On that front I have been blessed, I learned how to ‘center’ myself. Other siblings are still trying to find themselves.

I have wondered what it would be like to have had a father’s love, and as I got older the poison of his rejection blossomed into; self-blaming and imaginings.

The question

Why did your own parent choose to wander the earth than love and care for you?

He did not support us emotionally, physically, or financially throughout this journey of life. He was after all part author of our story.

Those emotions later evolved into indifference as I concentrated on ‘clearing’ my own path. He would re-emerge from time to time.

During my third decade of life, he introduced me to my new siblings.

Six to be exact.

We/I took baby steps toward building a relationship. A few years later he would leave his new family to return to Suriname, South America where he lived for a major part of my life.

I would then hear from him fairly often and it was then we had some long conversations. Whenever I demanded answers he was defensive. So eventually I let it be.

By this time my sister had concluded her relationship with him permanently.

The disassociation

He showed no real interest in getting to know us, his children, or his grandchildren. I finally decided to cut ties with him when during a visit to Guyana three years ago he publicly disrespected the love of my bonus mother.

A woman who had stood in his stead brandishing the mantle that had been his to carry. A woman who had loved and sacrificed for us so fiercely and unconditionally.

The woman who taught me so much including my love of God.

Exodus 20:12 — Honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord the God giveth thee.

And

Ephesians 6:4 — And ye father’s, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

How does one apply these words when the parent never assumed their parental role? I have exhausted all efforts to have a relationship with him.

I have concluded that he lacks the capacity to love. A soul so broken, it pilfered the ability to love his children and even himself. I see my father as an equal opportunity deserter…he left us all equally…at differing stages of life.

Hope floats

As I write this today I realize that God is working in me, that there is still a chance for redemption. Where I had previously vowed there was none.

Why did we not have a daddy to love us? I know my own pain, seen the pain in my sister’s eyes, heard her cries over him.

What was shattered that is not yet mended? Will he ever come into the fullness of his potential? Does he know the love and redemption of God?

Rhetorical questions.

Perhaps it was meant to be this way. I am persuaded that I will never have the answers I seek.

Our God holds the keys...and while we are living there is yet time…the chapter has not yet concluded…

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This story was originally published @-https://justpene50.medium.com/a-daddy-for-me- and https://justpene.com/a-man-called-daddy/