I never thought I’d have to relearn how to love my father.
Growing up most children idolize their parents. Even parents who are less than ideal. It is something in us that begs for their love and acceptance. I was no different.
In our household, the roles were slightly different. Dad was the nurturer. Mom was the discipline. While this left all of Mom’s children slightly damaged, we did know she loved us. Dad on the other hand told us and showed us he loved us by his actions. He seemingly gave love very unconditionally. We felt his love always. It was a big love. I have kind memories of my father from childhood. Always bright and cheery, unless he ran into a coworker and then he got serious, stern not with us, towards them.
That always puzzled me as a child, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Dad changed when he got laid off from his job when I was in the 6th grade. He wasn’t as cheery and bright anymore. According to him, no one would hire an almost 50 something washed up engineer. He did have job opportunities; they just were not close to the family and he was not willing to move away to make things work. So dad went back to school. He went back to be a HS math teacher. It didn’t go well. He taught Algebra 1-A to students at my high school for a year, and he wasn’t asked to come back. He went on to another school in a neighboring county, taught for a year with the same outcome. In my opinion, my father is too smart to be teaching High School students. I mean I’m an intelligent human and getting help from that man with my HS or college Physics didn’t always go well. His brain doesn’t think like mine and that’s just the way life works.
Regardless of all of that…I loved my Daddy. I was a Daddy’s girl through and through, and I was his Sunshine. His sunshine…that is my nickname from him. Do you know how I got it?
I was a freshman in HS, and our HS did this thing where they announced birthdays over the intercom. I had announced multiple of my friends’ birthdays through that first year of school, and thus on March 24th I sat there eagerly waiting for the birthday wishes to come in. Wondering which of my friends had told the announcer it was my birthday. Freshman year was the year my Dad taught at the HS, and wouldn’t you know not a single one of my friends wished me a Happy Birthday over the intercom…but my father being the loving, caring person he is sure didn’t forget. As Brad Foust went through the announcements, yes I still remember the name of the kid who did our HS announcements at least my freshman year when you seemed so small and the seniors seemed so big, he got to the last one:
“And we have a very special Birthday announcement to Laura Ellis. Having you in my life is like seeing the Sunshine after a week of Rain. Love Dad”
Yes, it was one of the sweetest things he could’ve done and made almost the entire school wish me happy birthday, but I was mortified and embarrassed none of my friends had wished me Happy Birthday. It was my Dad. I was called Sunshine by my close friends throughout HS and still by my Dad today. Needless to say today I love the nickname.
Either way…I tell you all this for two reasons…one to show you how close my father and I always were and two to describe the hard times in this man’s life. I know my father’s life hasn’t been easy for the past 20 years. I also think he is his own worse enemy. Your mind truly is a powerful thing, and my father has been working against himself roughly his entire life. At 70 years old, he is just now starting to realize, admit, and work on the beliefs in his head.
As the kids grew up, dad lost all he had left really. He had little projects here and there but growing up in the 1950s with specific gender roles, he felt as though he was failing as a man in life. He was not providing the main financial income for his family, and with all his children out of the house, he didn’t even have anyone to care for now either. This wasn’t easy for him.
He threw himself into projects at the church. He threw himself into mission work in Haiti. He lived for those trips and family vacation or the holidays when everyone was home again. He was seemingly keeping himself busy and slowly falling apart all at the same time.
That’s when the divorce came. That’s when my father got involved with another woman. None of us truly know to this day if this was purely an emotional relationship or if it had some physical aspects to it, but I can tell you this it did make my father come alive again. When he spoke about this “friend” he had, his eyes would light up. He may have been able to pull the wool over my siblings’ eyes but being 29 and single I knew all too well about those “friends” who made your eyes light up. I have had a number of “friends”. That’s where things fell apart between us. When he started lying to all of us to save his pride. That was the lye that said to me, “I chose her over all of you, and all the principles we grew this family on.”
I felt betrayed. I felt betrayed by the one man who was never supposed to betray me. He was breaking family agreements. The family agreements to this point were:
Family above everyone else.
We do the right thing
Even if the right thing is really hard to do.
I’m not upset with my father for breaking up his marriage to my mother. In all reality, I’m shocked it didn’t happen sooner. If our family hadn’t been in a state of crisis from 2000-2010 because of other family issues, I doubt they would’ve stayed together that long. But after they had gotten through seemingly the worst of it, what would break them up now?
Another woman.
As I said my mother was not a nurturer, and they had completely become more friends than anything else. The marriage wasn’t perfect, and no one was asking for it to change until my father met her. By that point he didn’t want the marriage to change, he didn’t want to see how he and mom could make the marriage work, he wanted out of the marriage. Which completely broke all the family agreements in one decision.
I don’t blame him for leaving. Maybe it was what was best for the family. We were all living a lie of an ideal nuclear family when we were anything but. We were all frauds.
I do blame my father for not telling us what really came between him and Mom. To this day, after multiple insinuations, a letter, and a very hard conversation to his face on my end, Dad has yet to admit to me or anyone in the family besides Mom, who caught them together one night after his lies, that a relationship ever existed with this other woman in his life. This is where he broke my trust. This is where he broke our relationship.
That was late 2017 into 2018. He moved out that year in March. The year of my 30th birthday. We hardly spoke for almost 2 years after that. Daddy had lost the Sunshine in his life. I felt guilt around not calling him. I felt guilt around having no idea what was going on in his life. I felt guilt for getting blackout drunk the Christmas of 2018 to avoid the awkwardness of that day. Yet I know all these things I did at the time for the survival of me. I was trudging through some shit myself in my own life, and I couldn’t handle the mental capacity to drag someone through with me.
During that Christmas break, I had a conversation about this with my sister at one point. I was angry about it as usual. I was annoyed he still wasn’t doing his part. My sister looked at me and said:
“This is Dad. If you want to forgive him, you are going to have to accept an apology he will never give.”
Man, that made me so frustrated when she said it. Mainly because I knew she was right. Dad was not going to admit his grievances.
I spent the majority of 2019 trying to forgive my father. Going out of my way to call him when everything inside of me didn’t want to pick up the phone. When everything inside of me knew that the conversation would end with me frustrated at him all over again. I had gotten to the point of giving up. I didn’t know if I could reunite the relationship with my father at that point. I didn’t know how I could ever forgive him without an apology.
Then that year, he went out of his way to contact me to come visit for Thanksgiving. It started. It was tough. Like really tough, but it started.
He’s still the most frustrating man in my life, granted I’m single. Go figure.
It isn’t easy. It doesn’t come easy to me. Especially because almost every time I see him it’s a deep emotional conversation about life and how to make it better. I swear that man thinks I somehow hold the secret to life and I’m just not sharing it with him. It’s like this is the only topic we can ever cover. Maybe because he hardly knows or understands or accepts what I’m doing with my life, and well thinking about it I guess it goes both ways. But we try. We really truly try.
I will always love him because that’s what daughters do. But learning to love your fallen knight in shining armor…is really fucking tough. Especially when you come to find out he didn’t slay the dragon, he freed it.
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