Father’s Day Blog

On this day, I want to take the time to honor my Father. Honestly, I have NEVER taken the time to do this. 

As I write this blog, I’m starting to tear up, you see because my Father was not actively in my life growing up. 

He was an absent father, which made me feel rejected and abandoned. 

He and my mother separated when my brother and I were young. 

Sadly no one told me WHY.

I was young and didn’t know how to ask questions. I bottled up all my emotions because I didn’t know how to express myself appropriately so I started coping negatively.

I get into more of that negative behavior later- 

So, I’ve decided to honor my Father on this day, as God said.

Now that may sound a little weird to you if you don’t understand how God works, but if you do, then we are on the same level of understanding when it comes to God telling us to do something. 

We know that it has a purpose, and I believe that many women might feel the same way I think or not but can at least identify as a fatherless daughter as I do. 

Over the last several months, I’ve been on a mission to learn and read books and articles about fatherless daughters. I found that 1 and 3 women identify as fatherless daughters. Ranging from the loss of their Father due to parents’ divorce/separation, emotional neglect/absence, death, addiction, jail, desertion, abuse, or never meeting her Father. 

Now I’m not going to get into a lot of statistics, but I did want to share a few findings I thought would be helpful. These findings were interesting because the parent divorce/separation was 28% but what was mind-blowing was the complete emotional absence was 26%. This means that the Father, even though his presence was in the home, he was NOT present with his daughter.   Now my Father was not in the house with us, but just thinking about the percentage of daughters that have their fathers in the home yet still feel rejected and abandoned is devastating.  

So why is  Fathers Day so important? 

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve NEVER honored my Father for anything. I never said Happy Father’s Day, Happy Birthday, or Happy anything. I never spent Father’s day or a birthday with him, because to be honest, I didn’t know how to. But today, I honor him simply because he was my Father. I praise Him because I have his DNA. Because God chose him to be my Father. And because I wish I had taken the time to spend with him while he was still alive.

For years, I unknowingly displayed anger, insecurities, low self-esteem, and not loving or understanding who I was. 

I had a poor attitude, attracting unhealthy, abusive men. I discuss in detail the two abusive relationships I was in in my first book, Love Thyself, which is available on Amazon.com.

I wore a MASK and constantly compared myself to others because I didn’t believe I was worthy. All of these were symptoms of my rejection and abandonment issues.  

It has taken me years, and to be honest, I’m still healing. Still, I’m so blessed to finally be in a  place of understanding who I am and finally forgiving my Father. 

Yes, FORGIVE my Father. 

I get it; forgiveness is NOT an easy thing to do. 

I certainly can not and will not tell you what to do, nor do I feel qualified to do so but forgiving my Father has been life-changing for me. It has allowed me to release the pain, hurt, anger, and feeling unloved. And forgiving him has opened me up to unconditional love from my God-sent husband, allowing me to use my voice and take off the mask.

I know you have probably heard it said that forgiveness is NOT for the other person, but forgiveness is for YOU. I hope that if you are a woman that feels rejected or abandoned by her Father, You can relate to feeling anger, hurt, pain, or not feeling worthy. You will take a moment to find ways to heal and understand it was NOT your fault. The healing process takes time and can be challenging, but it is life-changing. My healing process has involved lots of prayer, journaling, counseling, reading relevant books, and understanding the importance of self-care. I’m still in the process, but I’m happy I can see growth. I believe it’s essential for everyone to take the time to explore the areas of our lives that hurt to flourish and live a happy, fulfilled life. If not, we stay stuck.  

Letter of Forgiveness to my Father from my book Love Thyself.

Dear Father, 

I love you. I am so sad I didn’t tell you how much I loved you when you were alive. I miss spending time with you. I hate that I didn’t get to know you the way I wanted. I know you and mama didn’t get along very well, and I realize there was a need for you all to separate. Still, I am disappointed it happened and affected us negatively. We needed you to be there with us, spending time with us, helping us with our homework, going to the movies, and just talking about life. I needed you to show me what type of man I needed. So many years passed without a phone call or visit, and mama felt the need to consistently overcompensate by buying gifts or allowing us to get away with things because she wanted us to have the best. Your absence from our lives affected us in ways you couldn’t even imagine. As I develop a more intimate relationship with God, my heavenly Father, I forgive you for not being aware of what you were doing. I forgive you for not understanding how to parent your children and not knowing how to be a father to your daughter and son. I believe you loved us but didn’t know how to show it. I believe you were thinking about us just as much as we were. I believe you wanted to spend time with us but didn’t know how. Father, I love you and pray for you to rest in peace.

The other reason it was important for me to honor him is that this month marks 20 years of his death.  My father died on June 25th, 2002.

With love Tracy