A TESTIMONY: Making peace with Dad

My Dad was and still is a very solid man. He loves God, and I always sensed a close relationship between him and God. He did groundbreaking work for us, seeing that he was the first generation in his family to live for God and go into ministry. I will forever be thankful to my dad and my mom for loving Jesus. This is a heritage that far outlives any “sins of the father”.

I do not wish to dishonor him in any way by sharing my testimony with you. I know that children don’t always perceive things in the way that they really are. I am talking from my experience, and as with my mom, I know that my dad also tried his best and never meant to hurt me.

Once again: In comparison to other ladies, I had it easy.
However, minimizing my pain, because it didn’t fall into the category of gross abuse or rejection, will simply be denying the fact that I was hurting about my dad, and that it affected my life and contributed to my eating disorder.

Since I can remember I felt uncomfortable around my dad, almost as if there was something dirty or wrong about a father hugging his daughter. I never felt that I could spontaneously go sit on his lap or cuddle up next to him, as I saw my friends do with their dads. He was emotionally distant and didn’t show much affection to me. He was also very busy studying, working, and pioneering a church when I was growing up.

I remember an incident where my parents had friends over. I saw my dad’s friend playing with my brother, I longed to be included and went to sit on his lap. I was about nine, but I can still remember my dad’s face. He gave me the “I do not approve” look. I immediately withdrew, ashamed. I remembered that moment so vividly throughout the years that I believe the enemy suggested a lie to my young and impressionable heart that day. A lie I believed for many years. The lie that I was not worthy of affection and that there must be something repulsive about me.

It was also around this age where I became more aware of how I compared with other girls. I saw that I wasn’t necessarily one of the “favorites” with the boys. I also saw that those “favorites” had thin bodies, no freckles and great hair. Of course the enemy used this to further elaborate on the lie that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t have what it takes to win the heart of a man.

Yet, I so desperately needed affection from a male figure in my life. I wanted to know that it is alright to be held, that it didn’t necessarily have some sexual or inappropriate connotations. But I couldn’t get away from this faulty belief for a long time.
For many years I found it very difficult to just be friends with men. I was nervous around them and I felt very self conscious. I used joking and flirting as a smoke screen to hide the fact that I could never just relax or be myself.

Another thing that hurt my relationship with my dad was his relationship with my mom. They had problems, never huge fights, just a lingering unhappiness. When I got older my mom would confide in me about her unhappiness. Because I loved her so much and thought that she was perfect in every way, I always felt that she should divorce my dad and find a husband that was “worthy” of her.

When they ended up getting a divorce after 27 years, it hurt me so much and I felt guilty, as if I steered my mom into it. This was so confusing to me. Why did it hurt me so, if I all along felt that this was good for her? Today I know that part of the pain was that I felt as if she rejected me, the real me that is a lot like my dad, when she rejected him.

My dad’s personality was very different from my mom’s.
I actually take after him a lot: We are both extroverts and thrive on public speaking and teaching. On the down side, we are both passionate and get angry easily. My dad had an explosive temper, which became less so over the years, but it was scary at times when he was younger.
This was so contrasted against my mom’s calm and collected personality that I made the following conclusion early on: My mom was the good one and my dad the bad one.

I lived to please my mom, so the last thing that I wanted was for her to discover that I had the same ‘bad parts” as my dad. She knew of course, and I saw her disapproval when I got angry. I would do anything to change that. I despised the way I looked and the way I acted. I got to work on changing myself in any way possible. I started dieting, I starting picking up on what is socially acceptable and tried to always act exactly the way people expected me to. I just wanted to be like my mom: She was the soft spoken one, the calm one, the good one and the beautiful one.

So my parents’ relationship and also my own faulty and immature observations made me turn my back on my dad and on everything in me that resembled him, especially the “bad” parts.

This was really so sad: I refused to be like my dad, and yet I was a lot like him, and I craved his acceptance. I tried to please him without even knowing it. I was academically strong and so was he. He was always studying and he held a high regard for education. He was always encouraging me to earn a degree and get a prestigious job. I tried to keep up straight A’s for my dad and ended up getting a degree, so that he could be proud of me and I could feel valuable. Getting the degree was not a bad thing, but it didn’t give me the value I was so desperately looking for.

My dad changed a lot over the years. He always had a close relationship with God, and he really allowed the Holy Spirit to change him. At one point he became more affectionate towards me, but it was too late for me. I felt so uncomfortable, and to give him a hug was weird to me. I already distanced myself emotionally, and it was very hard to turn that around. I guess in a way I was now the emotionally distant one. I recognized his attempts to fix things, but I couldn’t do it. My self image was already shaped by the enemy’s lies. I felt weird around men , especially around my dad.

It was only years later when I had my own children that I started wondering about my dad and why I cut him out of my life, especially emotionally. I wanted to fix things. I didn’t want to just feel dead when I thought about my dad. So I started reading some books about this and talked to people. I remember one day when I read about grieving the loss of a dad’s affection. I felt so sad, I just started bawling. I couldn’t understand why it was so important to have those hugs, those tickles or those cuddles as a little girl; I just knew that it hurt so much when you didn’t get them.

I kept following the trail and it lead me to the fact that my dad’s background didn’t prepare him to raise a little girl. He carried so much pain inside him, that it only came out in anger, and the dysfunction in his own childhood handicapped him emotionally. He gave love as best he could; through providing for us and always being there for us physically.

At this point I was ready to forgive my dad. It was also in this process that I asked God to help me recognize and appreciate my dad’s whole person. I always focused in on his “bad parts” that I never looked at the many good things in him. I started writing him a letter, thanking him for the things he did for me and it was amazing how many there were.
How could I have been so zoomed in on the few bad things.?

While looking at my family, I realized that at least a few of us had this thing: We wanted people to change and be perfect before we could fully accept them, and we then laid this very heavy burden on ourselves as well. I could never accept my dad’s weaknesses, and rejected his whole person because of that. In the same manner I never accepted my own weaknesses and tried to be perfect at the cost of my own health and my sanity. When I finally let go of my denial and admitted to myself that my mom wasn’t perfect either, it was devastating to me, and it took me a while to move around that as well.

I thank the lord that he taught me to accept others and myself as a whole person, with the good and bad parts. There is no one just good or just bad. Even if we are washed by the blood of Jesus, we still have a fallen nature and live in a fallen world. It is such a relief to be able to cut myself and especially my children some slack: We live to be holy not perfect, so we’re not scared to fall and get up anymore. It’s part of life.

Today I’m able to stand back and see that yes, I had an emotional distant father and he did not give me everything a little girl’s heart requires, but he did his best.
I look at my own husband and I see the huge burden on a dad to provide for his family. I also see in the lives of my friends that a husband being a good worker, not cheating on his wife and putting his family first, is not necessarily a given. As a child I thought it was.
With my dad we always knew that we were safe, we always knew there would be a roof over our heads and food on the table, we always knew that he would not cheat on my mom, we always knew that he cared about us and that he had a good heart.
He was a stand-up guy, and I chose a husband like him.

And as always: God can and will change everything the enemy meant for bad in our lives into something good. Lacking in both my relationships with my parents, and having eating disorders partly because of this, made me search for answers.
Not only did I found understanding for them and forgiveness, but it made me discover the father heart of God: I learned that God cared about those deep emotions I had, and that he would pick me on his lap anytime I needed to be comforted or loved.

He is El Shaddai – the God of plenty – and more than enough for me…

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