There is so much confusion and madness in the world, at least in our material world, that we often forget that we are each so much more than all that. Even with all the censorship these days, I can go to Twitter to watch all the political drama and flair, it is other people's personal stories that open my heart, and what inspires me to share some of my own.
I just read a very touching story about someone conflicted about their father, not always there, missing so much of her childhood, whether mentally or physically or both. But still feeling the love and the yearning for her Dad, as if still a child. How more human can that be?
Fathers and daughters can be a bit of a mystery. When I was very young, early years raised on a small family farm on the northern coast of Maine, my Dad was both daunting and awe inspiring. He gave me lots of outdoor freedoms, climbing trees, wandering, riding my horse, never treated me like a girl child, encouraged me to try new things, to take risks. But there was always tension between him and Mom, and life wasn't easy, trying to survive on a small family farm with limited income. But I never felt poor, certainly never had an empty stomach. However, the rules were strict, meals at a given time, bedtime the same every night, church on Sundays (although Dad just drove Mom, my brother and me, but never attended.)
Things began to change between Dad and me as I reached puberty. I was out fishing with him, just the two of us, I was 12, and he looked at me and said, you need to start wearing a bra, and your hairy armpits are disgusting. It was like I had been stabbed with a saber, oblivious to my newly forming boobs, or the hair under my arms! I lost my Dad that day.
Years later I read a book, a title I cannot now recall, about how fathers often distance from daughters when they reach puberty, because on some level, they are really trying to protect them from perhaps their own unexpected inclinations.
Dad kinda left home when I was 14, we moved to Mom's hometown in Massachusetts, and he mostly worked away, coming home occasionally on weekends. And that was always unpleasant because I had become a wild and obstinate child that Mom couldn't control, probably every parent's worse imagination of having a teenage girl -- (although I wasn't a thief and never spent time in prison, all being relative!)
At 18, I moved out and moved all about, and I remember well the phone call that I got at my work place in San Jose, CA that Dad had died of a massive coronary. I was 25, he was 55. I remember thinking, well at least he lived a long life. Pretty ironic to say that now.
I had a difficult time grieving Dad, I didn't know him anymore, only remembered the bad and the ugly stuff, had totally forgotten everything else. But the point off all this is that 8 years after his death, he came to me, two nights in a row, no doubt in my mind these were visitations because I remember them as clearly today as I did then.
He presented as a young man, and in the first dream, he was carrying a violin, that he said he had made himself. He had an aura of absolute freedom of soul and presentation, and he played me wonderful music on that violin, and then even got down with some major hoe-down fiddle music. He was happy and smiling and loving, and it was all very amazing.
The next night he showed up again, and he had with him his new bride, and they arrived in a horse-drawn chariot, and he told me, the rest of it is all up to me. He was leaving. And then, he was gone.
The gift he brought me were all the buried memories of when he was so good to me, how he knew the names of every tree and plant, how amazingly talented he was, how he could build anything, and worked so hard, and taught me so much -- those memories all came back to me. And my anger at his rejection of my pubescent me, all disappeared.
I remembered, it is never too late to have a happy childhood.