Daddy Issues?

Fathers' Day has always come and gone without fanfare in my life. As a child, I imagine we did the regular Fathers' Day thing with my stepfather...although I conveniently do not remember a single detail from any particular Fathers' Day while I was growing up. After my stepfather disappeared from our lives, then Fathers' Day became a day that brought me neither joy nor sorrow. I never gave it much thought.

When I was a single mother, My son and I spent Fathers' Day the way we would spend any other happy Sunday...either at the park or at the beach. My dad wasn't around, his dad wasn't around, so we didn't really talk about fathers.

After I got married, my son would give or make Fathers' Day cards for his new step-father, but that was the extent of the celebration. After my STBX and I had our first child together, then Fathers' Day began to take on personal meaning for me. I focused my energy on celebrating the father of my children without giving much thought to the absence of my own father. Really, I have never had a hard time with this day...

...until this year. About two weeks ago was the first Fathers' Day since my husband and I have separated. Everything was set up perfectly. The kids had gifts for him, two handmade, one store-bought. He was to have them for the weekend, so I managed to get the bag of gifts up to the girls' bedroom without him seeing them when I brought their weekend bags over. I was scheduled to work the entire weekend and was actually happy to be covering for a pharmacist who is a father, so that he could spend time with his kids.

I also recently opened a Facebook account (yes, for the first time EVER), and that's where everything went down.

Still new to the Facebook world, I found myself exploring and checking out what my Facebook friends were up to. So far, the majority of my Facebook friends are married women with children, and on Father's Day weekend most were posting saccharine accounts of what made their husbands the perfect guy and the best father ever.

I got hung up on the "perfect guy" thing...all this appreciation for this model man that somehow happened upon their lives...gag me with a spoon...

It's not that I want to be bitter and cynical. Really, I went into the weekend thinking that I would post some kind of positive message, a link to a pretty daddy song, something that had nothing to do with my own situation. But who was I kidding? The whole thing was my own situation...I just wasn't aware.

It was while talking with my therapist about it last week that I became aware of what I didn't know I was feeling. I realized that I am still mourning. As my therapist succinctly phrased it, everyone was at a cheerful party while I was at a funeral. I am still mourning the loss of my dream.

This is something that I have not really allowed myself to think about during the past year. In fact, when people ask me how I am doing, my response if often, "Life is so freaking good!" (or fu**ing good, depending on my familiarity with the asker)...and it is...but there are layers.

The thing is that I had a dream (I know, Martin Luther King did too), and this idyllic, grateful and fulfilled life that my women friends were portraying with their pictures and their words of praise and gratitude was indeed what I had envisioned for myself when I got married. My dream was there in Facebook pictures of happy daddies and helpful husbands with appreciative captions from grateful wives.

Ouch...it still hurts to remember it. It was like watching a movie of a life I'll never have. What I realized in my therapist's office last week is that what I am trying to come to terms with is knowing that I will be happy somehow, but not in the way that I once imagined. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that the type of comfortable family life that I imagined is not going to be mine. That dream is not for me. Yes, it hurts to know that something I held so precious is now dead. There is no going back. There is no chance that things will work out, This I know, and it is this absolute knowledge that hurts so profoundly.

I am not beating myself up for feeling this way. It is a pain that demands to be felt. It is a dream that was dead well before I left my husband, but one that still merits mourning. I am sad for the hopeful and ingenuous young woman who married with visions of a happy and close-knit family. I am sad in the same way that I am sad for the wife and mother who was instead emotionally abused in so many different little ways that it is impossible to add them all up and explain in an average conversation how they amount to breaking a person down.

I am still healing, and there is still sadness to be felt. I will not deny myself a single cleansing teardrop. I will feel it all.