Shoelaces for Josie

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time – about 25 years to be exact. “Daddy issues” as our society so flippantly calls them have played a large role in my life as they have in so many peoples’ lives. Things that were said and done. Things that weren’t said and weren’t done. I needed more and, at the same time, I wanted less – I needed support, but I wanted the freedom to be me.

Details…details aren’t necessary. And if they are, well, they just aren’t. The thing about daddy issues is that we tend to use them as an excuse. I’ve done it myself in the past two decades. Blaming some of the situations and shortcomings of my life on my poor relationship with my dad. Pulling the “daddy issues” card out when I needed a crutch, when I needed to have a scapegoat, when I was recalling childhood memories.

I haven’t made any particular effort to connect with my dad since I left for college seven years ago. I’ve been financially independent for each of those seven years, and with every mile that physically stretched between us, two miles of emotional distance was erected. We didn’t have a base. We didn’t have a foundation to build on. There was too much water under the bridge.

But the past year and a half, I’ve been doing some tall thinking about my “daddy issues”. For so long, I’ve just blown it off. I’ve whined and grumped around about how I have a shaky relationship with my father, and I would point to the years of my childhood when all the water was flowing under the bridge. And there is water under the bridge. The trail it left behind is hard to miss, but…that’s the past.

And this is the present. He is an adult, and he is my father. But I am an adult too. I have an equal responsibility to work on our relationship just as much as he does. Maybe when we’re kids, the parents have to shoulder the responsbility more heavily as the adult. But now that I’m an adult too? I have an equal responsibility to make an effort.

The truth is, I was a difficult kid to raise. I could, ocassionally, about once every hour, be attitudinal and a touch ornery. It’s also true that things and decisions and conversations could have been handled differently. But they weren’t. You can’t go back and send the water back up the stream.

We don’t get do-overs. We get do-right-nows. And maybe that’s why I wrapped my arms around him that morning, squeezed tight and said, “It was good to be here for Christmas, Dad.”