Fathers?

Why do men have children they refuse to father? Why don’t you love us enough to come down from your mountain tops and play, laugh, teach us something? How can you expect us to go unto the world and understand or even accept men when our first experience was absence, distance, denial, harshness, discipline? 


How can I forgive you father? How can I release myself from the pain of your mistakes? Why do I have to carry them? If you had lived they would be yours to deal with.It’s been so many years and so many chapters of my life and yet you are a constant. Why can’t I move on from it, from you? I do appreciate you as a man in the world who did certain things, some of them great, all of them interesting and challenging. But that does not recuse you of your great failure to father your children.

And here I repeat history, raising another girl without a father. A father who exists in pictures and stories, too occupied with his own mission, art and other woman to take the time to love his daughter, to show her the kindness and love that a man can offer, that all children should have.

It does no good to wrestle with the dead. For you are dead. We can not work this through. I can never understand you. You will never know me. You can not apologize. Us living can only accept or not, forgive or not, hate or not, forget or not.