Father's Void

Someone shared on my Facebook page that Father’s Day is bittersweet. It is for so many women who grew up without their fathers or grew up losing their fathers or the relationship with their own.


When I was 14, my parents divorced. It was one of the most traumatic events in my life. I thought my world fell apart, and I became a very angry teenager. My father was no longer present in my life. I didn’t have him there to ask why or help me understand. I turned my anger on my mother with nowhere else to point my anger toward or a way to let it go and get my healing. It took some years, along with the patience and the unconditional love of my mother, to help my broken heart heal. It didn’t help that my father was a television producer, and I would see his name on the credits for TV shows. He had no credit or credibility in my life.


My anger caused me to choose unhealthy relationships. When I had the potential for having one that was healthy, I tore down the relationship before it had a chance to stand and grow strong. I never talked about what had occurred in my life. I didn’t know how to share, and I didn’t always know that I should share with a guy, “here’s my struggle.” I had a void due to feeling that I had been rejected by my father. He had left without an explanation. He had left without a goodbye speech. He had left with lies that left me with feelings that psychologists would call abandonment.


Those feelings were my life’s painful backpack. They held on to me like the skin on my bones and damaged my heart. The longer I didn’t deal with the feelings the heavier the backpack and the more negative impact on my life. My mother was the who helped me unload with love. She gently unzippered my hurt and lifted off the scars that were covering my emotions and heart. She talked to me when I was ready. During my adult years, and through the help of God,  she alone became my father and my mother. I don’t remember when I started sending her cards on Father’s Day, but I don’t let a year go by without saying both Happy Mother’s Day and Happy Father’s Day.

Today is bittersweet, and I do now have my father back in my life, but not in the same way that many have had their father throughout their life. I have friends who are feeling their father’s void because he was loving and the father everyone should have, but he has left this world. Their void is due to missing what once was. Then there are the friends who never knew their fathers. Their void is similar to the one I once had because their father never participated in their life. Then there are the friends who grew up in Foster Care, who share the void of not knowing why their father couldn’t keep them. Many are blessed that their Adoptive or Foster Father gave them what they never knew biologically.

Yes, father’s day is bittersweet for many. I am thankful for a wonderful father-in-law, Willie Ferrell, who is like a father to me. We have many father daughter talks. I miss my spiritual Dad, Ernest Washington. I came across his obituary the other day, and I think about the void that was left in my life when he left this world. He took the empty out of some voids, though, by filling my life with great financial wisdom, career advice, and the kind of guidance about relationships that allowed me to be able to have sung to my loving husband and me at my rehearsal dinner “At Last.” My husband is a great father who lost his own son, yet he is helping to fill his own voids as we mentor foster kids and he teaches them about money.

Happy Father’s Day, and if it is bittersweet, learn how to still live and receive healthy love.