Forgiving My Father
I am coming from a quite conventional family. My mother thought that marriage, house, and kids were the key to happiness for a woman, so she married my father, and did her best to appear as a respectable woman. My father cared about his work, friends, and coworkers more than he cared about his family, but it was alright in the end: he did not drink or do drugs, and was not violent. When I was little, he used to spend time with me, but as I started approaching adolescence, he became more and more distant and withdrawn due to his work. Seemingly, everything was alright: he would always come home for lunch at about noon, joke around, tell the hottest news going around the place he was working at, ask me how was school, and then go back to work where he would stay till late night. My mom did not complain or resent, she had everything she needed, but there was this growing hunger in me of being ignored and abandoned.
Because my own family deemed the situation as normal and healthy, I had nobody to talk about my loneliness. Gradually, I started feeling more and more isolated. While my dad always preached how important it was to be employed, and how much good it was doing for the society, he did not care much about what was going on with his own son. It was mom who taught me how important it was to be educated, and how it could help in pursuit of dreams, and I started thinking about my father as a coward who was hiding behind his work, and was afraid to take responsibility for his own child.
While I am a grown man now, I am still struggling with these feelings of mind-boggling, numbing anger towards my father. It is so strange because it seems like these feelings should pass with years. All the while, I always loved my father. But these feelings seem too powerful and beyond my control. I realize how important it is for parents to spend time with children, how significant are these early experiences for their growth.
All these years I have been struggling to forgive my father. I have always been told that forgiving brings so much relief and freedom. But I cannot help but think that his carelessness towards me caused me a lot of damage.
As I am a mature man now, I understand some of the experiences that shaped his personality and his outlook on life. I hope that one day I will be able to fully understand and fully embrace him, and go on my own way, free of any trauma. And perhaps, I will be a better dad to my own children …
