My Father, My Hero [A Month of Heroes]

I have been a member of National Blog Posting Month (Nablopomo to you cool kids) for a year or so now, but none of the monthly themes have actually made me want to try blogging them for an entire month. Until this month.

Thirty heroes in June

This month, I am going to write about my heroes. The challenge is to find thirty heroes and write about them, and honestly, after the first eight or ten I listed so far, I am not sure who my other heroes are. This should prove to be an interesting month.

My first hero: my Daddy

I realize that plenty of you don’t know me in real life, and many of you are new readers, so you probably don’t know that my Dad and I didn’t really speak to each other or get along much for about twelve years. That he has a place in my heart again, and is the first person I want to write about this month, is a pretty amazing thing.

Let me tell you why my Dad is one of my heroes.

Last year, during the late fall (or early winter, depending on how desperately you cling to any season that is NOT winter, which is me), my Dad checked himself into a voluntary rehabilitation program. Now, no matter which way you cut it, checking yourself into rehab WITHOUT BEING COERCED is a brave thing to do. Not only that, but admitting you have a problem in the first place is PRICELESS.

What I wrote last year, when I blogged that he was going to rehab, was this:

He and I have had the worst history of relationship FAIL that I have ever experienced. He is controlling, emotionally abusive, and (apparently) ALWAYS right about everything. Oh, and very handy with the guilting people. It has taken me most of my adult life to move beyond most of the pain I carried with me from childhood because of how and who he is; which is why this is probably the best time in the world, right now, for him to need anything from me at all.

Since he went through the whole program, and got himself back on track, I have seen a new man. A new person. A man that I didn’t even know was there, a man that I wish I had known better when I was a child and a young woman.

This is the man I can be proud of – this is the father I am eager to claim as my own.

Don’t get me wrong when I say that, and assume that I mean that I drop people when they don’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about myself, or that he bothered me so much I just ignored him until he went away. I held a deep and cavernous amount of pain from my childhood for a long time, not just from the emotional crap that happened, but also because I WANTED MY DADDY and he wasn’t there.

Every little girl wants her daddy. Every young woman wants to know that her father loves her. And every grownup woman still longs for her daddy, just like she did when she was that little girl.

In the past several months since last November, I have actually called my Dad ON PURPOSE to talk to him. I have gotten in my car, and driven ON PURPOSE to visit him. When my step-grampa passed away in January, he was the one that called me to tell me. He and my grandma were still waiting for the undertakers to drive my dear step-grampa away to the funeral home, waiting there while his mortal body cooled and his soul winged its way heavenward, and he called me to tell me.

I can’t really write about how deeply it touched me that he called me then. It is very difficult to articulate in my thoughts, let alone form cohesive sentences about it; but that deepness nearly touches the deepness of my decades-old pain. When I talk to my Dad now, I smile. Spending time with him makes me feel more whole. It’s like finding a piece of myself after all these years, and being able to put it back into the hole that it came from; and realizing, with joyful surprise, that it fits just like it always did before.

Tagged as: Add new tag, my father is my hero, national blog posting month