Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

I have your eyes. The kind that are so dark brown they turn near-black depending on my mood. I don’t know why that’s the first thought I had but there it is.

I miss you today. I wish I could call you just to say “Hi! Happy Birthday!” I miss the way I could be my messy-self with you. You had no expectations except that I be myself. And you saw the beautiful, creative, curious person I was before I even knew it was there.

I wonder if you realized removing yourself from my life would leave me vulnerable to the full weight of being who others expected me to be. A weight I completely failed to carry. Did you expect me to be the strong one when you left? Because I wasn’t strong. And quite frankly it wasn’t my job to be strong. It was yours.

I tried like hell to hold myself together. I wanted desperately to be everything for everyone else, to meet their expectations. But I couldn’t do it. I was too busy trying to holding the shattered pieces of myself together that I didn’t know how to them together as well. There’s only one of me and I only have two hands!

So I searched for a safe place trying like hell to glue the shattered pieces back together while somehow still fulfilling the needs of those you left behind. I failed. Failed them. Failed myself. Maybe I even failed you.

And those shattered pieces never turned out to be exactly what they were or what they could have been. And there it is: “what could have been”. I try not to think about it but in August those thoughts poke their sneaky noses out of the hole I buried them in and they refuse to be denied.

Which brings me back to wondering if you realized exactly what your absence would mean for me. I wonder if you realized that by removing yourself that seedling of creativity you tenderly began to water would be shoved in a dark closet and after all beautiful things rarely grow in the dark.

I wonder if I would be further along this journey to embracing who I really am as a creative person if you had stuck around. I guess I’ll never know….

The truth is: I am a creative person who is constantly itching to write or sketch. I got that from you.

The truth is: I’m a curious person. I want to know about the world around me. People intrigue me. I just want to sit down and hear their stories. To understand what they believe and why they believe it. To have a conversation with them and be their friend with no expectations. I also got that from you.

The truth is: I’m a category-breaker. But this one’s on me. I chose to be different from the way you raised me. Because while being with you, in the safety of our home, I was able to be my messy self, out there in the world, I didn’t get a chance to live it. You were such a real and genuine person except at the end when you hid the mess. When you said “I’m fine” because you thought you had to be strong and keep it all together when you were really dying inside. (I wish you had given yourself the same measure of freedom you gave others.) So I chose to be different. I chose to be honest about the hard things. I choose to say “I’m not ok today. Today I am sad.” I choose to pick up the phone and say “help me” when the darkness is overwhelming and I see no other way out then the one you took. I choose to look at the categories society has created for me and say “I don’t fit that” and instead of pretending like I fit and breaking myself to conform, I choose to break the category and just be me. Jenifer. The person I was always intended to be. I’m not there yet. I realize I’ve got 20 plus years of habits to break but I’m learning to give myself grace, every moment of every day… and that I did learn from you.

So while took me longer than it could, had you chose to stick around, to realize the beauty of who I am and even longer to truly start embracing it, I have hope that for the coming days…. Hope, because I’m finally taking steps to embrace the unique, creative, curious, category-breaker that I am. Hope that despite you’re mistake (and it was a mistake) I can still be the best damn version of myself God intended from day one. Hope because I’m stronger and braver than even I know. Hope that death doesn’t have the final word. Hope because Jesus redeemed and is redeeming not only your mistakes but mine and turning them into something beautiful.

So Happy Birthday dad. I miss you and I miss the relationship we could have had.

And thank you. Thank you for seeing the creative person I was before I did (Seriously, I was so confused that Christmas you gave me an art easel and the most beautiful set of brushes and oil paints because back then I didn’t know how much I loved painting and sketching). Thank you for passing along a passion for loving others and a desire to engage in true and thoughtful conversation. Thank you for all the stories you told me about life in Haiti, I have no doubt they played a role in my adventures overseas.

And thank you for teaching me, by your failures. Thank you for teaching me we were never intended squish ourselves into categories others created for us. Thank you for teaching me we were never intended to do the gut-wrenching hard things alone. Thank you for teaching me the importance of asking for help.

And thank you for teaching me about grace. Grace that is allowing me to say again: “I forgive you”. Because I do. I forgive you for walking away for the best job you ever had: being my dad.

Love Always,

Jenifer