Perhaps I should just accept it. Accept that Father's day is still hard for me. Accept that time doesn't make grief go away, and instead every new experience, every change, and growth shows grief in a fresh light.
I remember being a tiny girl, but old enough to answer the phone. Daddy called the house because he was filling out paperwork at work. He couldn't remember our birthdays and he needed to put them on the form. I was so proud and happy that I was able to help my daddy by telling him everyone's birthday. He was so big and important, he could do everything, it was wonderful that there was some little thing that I could do for him.
When I was growing up, my birthday always fell within four days or so of Father's day, and we always had a joint party. One year we went to the beach for the weekend to celebrate and he bought me little earrings - tiny pearls in tiny shells - that I cherish to this day. Each year that special day was a mix of what we each would want, burgers and mom's homemade potato salad, blueberry pie or chiffon cake. Laughter and fun and games. I loved sharing my special day with my dad. Somehow now, my birthday doesn't feel right without him, and Father's Day is a kind of gaping black hole. I think it won't matter - it's just another day - but it does matter, living without my dad does matter.
In about five months, my husband and I will welcome our first child into the world. The child we had given up hoping for, the baby we never dared to dream about. That child will enter my life three years after my father left it, possibly within days of that third anniversary, certainly within weeks. Every day that brings me nearer to that moment of becoming a parent, seems to cut more deeply the wounds of my grief. Wounds I thought I was at peace with at least. Somehow it seems I am carrying the love of a life now gone and a life not yet here at one and the same time. They are related. In the birth of my child I will mourn the loss of that child's grandfather - and what a grandfather he would have been! - a rich heritage of love, patience and knowledge that I feel so inadequate to pass on. Through every crisis of my life, my father stood beside me, and then, one day, he was gone forever.
But I am grateful my child will have a father who will love and sacrifice for that child every bit as much as my father did for me and my siblings. I am grateful that I have a husband to walk through life with, to help me bear the pain, to share with me the joy. I am grateful that we are a family ourselves now in a way we haven't been up to this point. I both long for and dread the moment I officially become 'mother,' a name I will bear for the rest of my life, no matter what becomes of my child.
When I discovered love and began to build a marriage, it was painful, difficult, hard work, but it was, in a way, what I had expected it would be. Although surprising and challenging in ways I had not anticipated, love and marriage carried with it the basic content I had always expected it would. This doesn't appear to be the case with expectant parenthood. This experience carries with it a spectrum of emotion and a shift in being that I never anticipated or understood in the smallest way. I expected it to change my life. I didn't expect it to change my identity, my priorities, myself.
It seems as if everything about who I am and why I am has become fluid and changeable, and I am bewildered by this lack of stability. This, of course, is not unrelated to how much I am currently missing my father.
It is time for me to find that stability somewhere else: in myself, in my husband, in God. But I know now, that the grief will never really go away, so I live wounded. Knowing, even when I cannot feel it, that it is truly better to have loved and lost than to live without love.
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