As I stare at a blank screen with a flashing curser, I can
hear three of my grandchildren playing a game at the table with their dad. ‘With their dad’. I hear laughter. I hear the voices of my grandchildren
bursting out challenges against their dad, commands to ‘wait’, and more
laughter. I find myself searching my
memories for familiarity of their experiences with their dad.
I love my dad. One of
my sisters in particular and I enjoy creating scenarios in our chat sessions
that involve our dad and our mom and various other family members. They are always joyous, loving, caring, and
fun – often funny. Not from memory. We are not reliving actual experiences. We’re creating a family dynamic where there
wasn’t one. The foundation is our belief
that our parents truly and deeply loved us despite the scattering out of our
family while we were yet quite young.
I saw a photograph of my eldest granddaughter taken just
yesterday by her dad who had gone to check on her and the other kids that he
and his friend had delivered to church camp a few days ago. It was a beautiful photograph of her. He always takes the best photos of her. As my daughter and I discussed this I
realized that he brings out her natural beauty when he photographs her. It’s not because he’s a better photographer –
in truth, I am. I have fewer blurry
photographs and get better angles. But
he brings out her beauty because of their relationship. You can see it in her eyes in the photographs
he takes of her – the adoration, the love as she is not looking at the camera,
but at the one holding the camera, her dad.
I must confess that my very first response was not that of
admiration of their relationship, but of suspicion. Fear and suspicion griped my heart as I
looked at the look in her eyes, knowing she was looking at her dad. Thankfully, as my daughter and I discussed
this, I realized that my response was not based on any of my son-in-law’s
behavior, but on my own personal experiences.
So I said, “I need to ask someone who has had a healthy relationship
with her own father if something like this is normal.” I went through a mental list of people I knew
and thought of each one’s relationship with her father. Sadly, I only knew one person I could ask if
it was ‘normal’ in a healthy father/daughter relationship, for the daughter to
have such a look while looking at her own father.
I asked my son-in-law about his relationship with his own
father. He assessed that it was a
healthy relationship but what he described to me would still fall under the
category of dysfunctional. It was
sporadically healthy at best. So I
thought about relationships I know about and realized that most can be
described as sporadically healthy. Then
what makes the difference? Why does one
dysfunctional relationship result in the adult child perceiving it as a bad or
hurtful relationship and another results in a positive perception? I think, in
part, attitude. Example – my sister and
I do not have to create positive, loving and fun scenarios of our dad; we choose
to, it’s our attitude towards him.
Though absent for most of our lives, we choose to love him. She has more actual memories of him than I
do, but what I do have, I cherish. I
hold those memories like precious children, close to my heart.
