Father’s Day is a minefield for me.

As a girl, I had a complicated relationship with my father whose unhappiness and life stresses I was ill-equipped to understand. As we both grew older, I came to know us both better, and I loved him from a place of healed hurt and disappointments forgiven. When he died, he hadn’t been fully present in his body for some years, and so the end of our time together mirrored the beginning of our time together, with glints of connection encapsulated by dense hazes of distance. But this latter distance was one we strove to lessen rather than one created of our own intentional issue.

My thoughts turn often to my father, both through memories of moments shared and through imaginings of his reactions to where my life is taking me. In my thoughts, I choose to hear his voice as soothing and comforting, as supportive and encouraging. I see him picking me up when I stumble and brushing the dirt from my knees and elbows. In my thoughts, I don’t choose to hear his anger or harsh criticisms, his vitriol or his abruptness. In my thoughts, we share only connection, and the rest falls away. His soul, to me, is kind and loving, having shed a body and a life that was sometimes harsh and often unforgiving. When I invoke him, it is usually at night, as I am getting into bed, and I hear his staccato chortle as he tucks me into bed and kisses my forehead. I have forgiven him all of my child hurts.

And yet, the anger and harsh criticisms have not departed. As if the Law of Conservation of Mass applied equally to childhood stings and injuries, my early self-doubt, fueled by the criticism and anger of others, has subsumed those external voices and personalized them. Long after the harsh voices of others have softened into gentleness, the residue of their original power has created fertile ground for my own inner critic. They have informed my own voice and have become such an indistinguishable element of my own psyche that their actual softening in time has not measured proportionately in their influence on my mien.

Which brings me, in some roundabout sense, to another version of relationship with father. My daughter, who is 11 now, hasn’t seen her own father for four years. Briefly my husband, her father and I separated when I was pregnant with her, and we had not spoken for some months when I went into labor. Since her birth, he has blown in and out of her life, sometimes for months at a time, and sometimes for years. His most recent departure has been the hardest for her, acting more like an abscess than an absence. This is the one she remembers the clearest. This is the one she internalizes.

She doesn’t remember when she was growing in my belly that he was so divorced from my reality that he would spend late nights out cavorting with friends and return in the wee hours, argumentative and hurtful. She doesn’t remember the night he left, when I was 7 months pregnant, and I cried on the ground as he pealed out of the parking lot. She doesn’t remember when she was two weeks old that he left to get something at the store and didn’t return for months. She doesn’t remember on the eve of her first birthday that he promised to spend the day with us, that when he didn’t show up, I yelled at him through the intercom at his girlfriend’s house like a Jerry Springer talk-show caricature because he wouldn’t come out to see us. And she doesn’t remember that she spent the next three years of her life not even knowing she had a father, learning only months after “meeting” this friend of mine at lunch and then gradually spending more time with each other that he and I had been married and that we had made her together.

What she does remember is that when she would see him, he was fun and funny, charismatic and charming. He played games with her and talked to her in different voices with comical accents. He would pretend his hands were snakes named Sam and Fred who always argued with each other. He told her stories. He made her laugh. He enchanted her, like he did me, and then he left her, again.

He was not harsh to her. He did not raise his voice with her or show her his anger. Her memories of him are fond and fun. And few.

Today is Father’s Day, my own personal minefield. My daughter is at camp with 100 other girls aged 7-18. Named after the woman who founded the Girls Scouts of America, the camp is run by women. There are no boys there. There are no men there. I don’t know what they are doing to talk about or celebrate Father’s Day at her camp today. I don’t know if she is thinking about or missing her father today.

I do know that I am missing mine. I am missing the times when I saw him happy and when we laughed together and appreciated each other. I am missing the epiphanic moments when I recognized how hard he tried and how much he suffered his own disappointments and frustrations, how much he regretted his own mistakes. I regret that my child’s mind could not comprehend his pain and instead internalized it as my own. I regret that my woman’s mind remained so tortured with guilt and self-loathing that I chose my own partner so poorly.

But I do not regret—I DO NOT REGRET—the beauty that was conceived and borne from that choice, the fiery spirit who rose from the murk to enlighten my darkest places and to teach me to see the best in myself. I cannot regret any of the challenges or disappointments I faced when each of them fell into perfect synchronicity to bring me exactly where I am today.

So today, as I navigate this minefield that is Father’s Day, a path of safety and hope is illuminated by this gift of motherhood, of daughterhood, of healing, of forgiveness, of fortitude, of persistence, and of love.

Published Father’s Day, 2015