The Lessons of Orphanhood

From Mirada Global:

Father’s day was never one of the happiest days of my childhood. I lost my father when I was nine and from that date on, the issue was a kind of taboo and everyone tried to make me forget the only pain I had experienced in a life overflowing with love: I didn’t have a dad. I was an orphan; a word that sounded like a punch in the stomach or a dart to the heart: orphan, orphan, orphan.

Cancer took my father, a beautiful, tall, smiling and loving man of 46. This left a trail of mourning and tears that forever marked the face and the gaze of my mother, who ripped off a part of herself in the burial of the deeply beloved husband. I was told the clumsiest and hateful things about it: that I had to accept God’s will, that it was the best for him, that now I had to be particularly good to my mother, etc.

I never was one to give in easily and lower the guard. And it was no different concerning this important episode in my life. I decided that if I didn’t have a father, I could live without one. And that I wouldn’t give anybody the pleasure of seeing me sad and crying. I gritted my little teeth with anger, clenched my fists and started a struggle for the happiness that seemed to have been stolen from me forever with the disappearance of the beginning of the reality of my horizon.

It wasn’t easy. My heart tightened when I saw my friends and schoolmates with their fathers celebrating Father’s Day, birthdays, Christmases, filled with the force and the affection that weren’t present in my house or in my life. Despite my mother’s attempts to be both mother and father to me, she didn’t succeed. And the lack of the father figure was felt like an irreparable amputation.

But orphanhood also taught me lessons I tried to learn as best I could. I learnt that we can’t take anything in life for granted. We must struggle bravely and courageously, with persistence and tenacity. We don’t gain life through a lazy “a priori”. It must be sought with nails and teeth and no struggle is big enough to keep it and gain it over and over at every breath, at every instant. This is how I grew up, this is how I met the man who is today the father of my children, and when paternity once again filled my house and my life, I decided I wouldn’t let it go away so easily.

Also available in Spanish.

Tim Reidy