Father to the fatherless
Posted on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 by oneP3 | (0) Comments
I had a very sweet and sad moment with my daughter tonight. The pain of being part of a broken home evolves and tonight I felt the suffocating sadness of this in a new way. My little girl is over two years old now and has started talking about daddys. I have avoided this topic for the most part up until now because she wasn’t asking about a father and I wasn’t sure how this was all going to go down. I mostly read her books about moms and babies. Occasionally I would mention a dad, but it was easy to pass over…up until now. We were reading a book the other day with a picture of two birds and a nest of babies. She pointed them out individually and named them “mommy,” “baby” and “daddy.” This startled me a little bit. I will be completely honest and appropriate with my daughter about our story, but I just thought I had more time. I looked at her and asked her if she had a daddy. She looked at me, smiled quizzically, and said, “no!” I explained to her that she did have a daddy and that he went bye bye. She got a glassy look in her eyes, looked off and repeated those words to herself, “daddy went bye bye.” And then she was back to playing. It was excruciating to be a part of that little scene. I have poured over this issue with prayer. I am seeking counsel about how to approach this with her. I want her to always know her story…not be shocked about it because she doesn’t learn the story until she’s older. I am praying that the Lord will grow her little heart to be able to handle the story with grace, forgiveness and integrity. I am praying that she will dig deeply in the Lord and be stronger because of this tragedy.
So, I recently brought home her baby book. I stopped filling it out when her dad left us. But the first five months of her life (and my pregnancy) is chronicled in those pages. I decided to show her the book tonight so that she could see herself and get some familiarity with the story and the characters in it. The first several pictures were just pictures of her dad and I during my pregnancy—on vacation, going to the beach, snuggling at home. She crouched down and stared at the pictures. She pointed out each person, mommy, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles. When she got to the pictures of her dad she asked, “mommy, who’s this?” She did this every time she saw a picture of him. And every time I told her, “that is your daddy.” She stared at him intensely for several seconds. I started crying. I saw in her eyes that she was trying to process it in her own, juvenile way. And I ache for all the times I will have to see that look in her eyes as she matures and the reality hits her. She just kept flipping the pages and asking me who he was. Then a very sweet moment transpired. She looked at me and said, “daddy not here. Daddy went bye bye.” And she reached out her little arms and put them around my neck and hugged me and then went back to looking at herself in pictures.
It will never be easy to come to terms with how incomplete and damaged the life I have to offer her is. I would do anything to rewind history so that she doesn’t have to know this. I am so sad…for her, for me, for what her father is missing. What is my hope? I know what it is. It is that God promises that He will be a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow. I realized that what I have to offer Stella is broken by sin, but mended by God’s gracious promise. So, while I continue to walk in this land in between, I will tell her the honest story of the fall, but I will also tell her the story of God’s adoption of her through Jesus. And in the meantime, I will continue to petition God for the most profound story of redemption for our life that I have every heard.