I find that there are many bittersweet moments in the life of a parent and a child. The moment you first see his or her sweet face, heading home from the hospital for the first time...there are too many of these moments to count. Just last week, I totally lost it as Claire devoured her very first bowl of squash. All of these moments make me so proud that Claire is growing and thriving, but they also make me sad because they're all happening so fast. Every time she does something new, I get that familiar ache in my chest.
Lately, what really gets me is watching Claire and her father, my husband, together. This is more sweet than bittersweet, but it still evokes major emotion on my end. He loves her so much, and I suspect she thinks he's pretty swell, too. I find this especially sweet because Jim is one of three boys and a long line of male cousins. In fact, Claire is the first female born into his family in more than a century. While I was always confident that he'd be a wonderful, hands on dad with a son or a daughter, I never expected him to be so good with our little girl. He's totally uninhibited in his adoration of her. It makes me love him even more than I already do, which if you can't tell from previous posts, is a whole lot.
Watching my husband with our daughter has made me reflect on my relationship with my dad. And here we go, I am getting that familiar ache in my chest and lump in my throat, even as I type this. A self-proclaimed daddy's girl for most of my childhood, I spent many of my Saturdays growing up sitting shotgun in my dad's red caddy (not a cool cadillac, but a grumpy old man cadillac). We would run errands, go mini-golfing and play whack-a-mole at the local arcade for hours. We'd go to the local magazine store where he'd pick up a Sporting News and I'd beg for candy. I eventually graduated to tween magazines, then teen magazines. We'd play catch in the backyard or race go-carts at the local track. It was fun, and I loved it.
As I got older, Saturdays with dad at the batting cages gave way to Saturdays at the mall with friends. Greenville Braves games with dad turned into movies with boyfriends. Our relationship changed. I still loved him, but I had other interests. As it turns out, so did he. Namely, he was interested in women who weren't my mom. I'll leave it at that.
I ended up being the one to find out about my dad's extracurricular activities. I had just turned 18, and I was heading off to college in a matter of months. A culmination of things led my mom to find out that my dad was being repeatedly unfaithful. He moved out. I was torn because although I loved my dad, he had done some really awful and embarrassing things to our family. I would never be able to erase those images in my mind -- images that no girl should have of her father. Worst of all, he left. He left his wife and his kids. Flat out, no looking back, he left. In a sick twist of fate, around the same time that my dad left, I was diagnosed with lupus, a sister disease to rheumatoid arthritis, the disease my dad had been living with for more than 20 years. The diseases likely have a common genome, making them easily passed from generation to generation.
We tried to maintain some kind of relationship, but he was under the spell of a new woman who had no interest in us, so he gradually and painfully slipped out of my life my sophomore year in college. Thank goodness for student loans, or I would have been up a creek without and education. Many painful years full of mistrust of everyone around me followed. What's left of my family -- my mom, my sister and my brother, plus our spouses and children -- has struggled in many ways to pick up and move on. We've tried to establish relationships beyond my dad. We're better than we were, but not there yet. We have all found that emotional wounds are slow to heal and quick to scar.
I guess all I am trying to figure out here is at what point certain families go wrong. My dad was a pretty good father to me. He wasn't always there, and he certainly was not a good father to my siblings, but he was pretty good to me. How do you go from proximity to distance? How do you cross that long bridge from spending every Saturday together to estrangement? I haven't spoken to my dad in five years. He knows I am married, but he wasn't at my wedding. He's never met my husband. My brother walked me down the aisle. I suspect he knows I have a baby by now, but he doesn't know her name and has certainly never held her like a grandfather should. He's just this person I used to know, who is part of my history, but likely not a part of my future. His image is stagnant in my mind, never changing, never improving.
As time goes by, I can go days, sometimes even a whole week without thinking about him, but that sense of loss is always there. When I look in the mirror, I see remnants of him from the color of my eyes, to the shape of my nose, to the fineness of my hair. When my hands and knees hurt from the pain of lupus, I wonder if he's hurting, too, and if pain is all we might have in common now. Then, I swear to never be like him, to love my family for as long as I live and to keep my promises, even when it's hard.
As I watch my husband with our child, I can only hope that he will always love her like he does now, that he will be there for all of the important moments of her life and that he will look back on his life with her knowing it was time well spent. There are so many sweet moments ahead for all of us, and I look forward to the branches of our family tree growing and blooming. Most of all, I look forward to Claire being a daddy's girl, because for her, it's something of which she can be proud.
