The Power of Forgiving

Sometimes I wonder how I ended up with the father I have. How does God choose our fathers? Why does he choose them? Why do men who deserve children not have them while those who don’t, do? Why do good kids have bad fathers and bad kids have good ones? What about the father/child duo who seem like the perfect match, how’d they get so lucky?

My dad wasn’t the best. He wasn’t the smartest. He wasn’t the most loving. He wasn’t the type of father I felt anyone would want to call “dad” because of the way he treated me. In fact I called him by his name, Curtis. He was just a man with kids that he didn’t know how to properly raise because of his inability to mentally, emotionally and spiritually process his own shortcomings in life. My childhood was consumed with him blaming his downfalls on me. He also talked very condescendingly while he did it. He did not encourage me to be anything, want anything or have anything in life like fathers are supposed do, so how did he earn the title of a dad?

In fact, he did quite the opposite. He taught envy, selfishness, poor self-esteem, hate for others including family and violence against people he deemed a threat to him even when they meant well. So again I ask, why was he a father? Why was he my father? I didn’t believe in what he preached nor could he persuade me to. What good did he do me? He didn’t teach me how to save money, how to carry a conversation, how a man should treat a woman, to embrace my imagination or deal with the overwhelming emotions of my mother not being around during my childhood. There’s nothing positive I can directly attribute to him for purposely putting forth a conscious effort at making sure he schooled me in the game of life that takes the form of a value or skill that I would need later down the road. Nothing.

I feel like I deserved a father who showed me how to embrace my differences, to enjoy my adventurous spirit and pursue my thirst for the curiosities of this world with every ounce of zeal I had in me. And to leave no stone unturned in the process. I wonder who I would be if I had that? How far would I have gone? How great would my accomplishments be had a dad been my biggest cheerleader along the way?

But, that’s not what God gave me. So now what? Now, I let it sink in. Now I let it be what it is. Now it becomes a lesson within itself. Now it becomes a story of healing. Now it becomes a journey of unlearning. Now it becomes my empowerment to truly understanding the potential I have through self discovery. You may read this and think I hate my father. When I was younger, I did in the sense that all kids “hate their parents.” But no, I don’t hate him.

As a grown woman, fully in-tune with who she is, good and bad, I hurt for him. I hurt for him never knowing a world outside of the space he locked himself into. My dad was the epitome of social distancing. So I hurt for him pushing himself away from us. I hurt for him never living his dreams. I hurt for him never owning a home. I hurt for him never embracing his family with real love and compassion. I hurt for him never being mentally stable enough to enjoy life for what it was.

I hurt for him for the overwhelming embarrassment he felt for the man he let himself become. I hurt for him not knowing how to truly smile without worry. I hurt for him never seeing the world with me. I hurt for him not knowing a life of pain and strife. I hurt for him not being able to be a true grandfather. I hurt for him not knowing how to alleviate the source of his anger and taking it out on me instead. I hurt for him because he didn’t know how to hurt for himself in order to become a better him.

Not only do I hurt for him, I forgive him. He never got it right, but deep inside I know he wanted to. I saw the good in him even when he didn’t show it to others. When I was a little girl I’d lay under the junk cars he’d buy and fix up with him watching him work for hours. When it would start after all his hard work, every now and then when it was just us, I saw him forget his troubles and we would laugh and celebrate.

Sometimes we’d even sing songs by his favorite gospel group, The Williams Brothers, and dance a little too. He knew he didn’t have to worry about me laughing at him and that it was always with him. Especially because it was so rare to see him smile care free. He may not have instilled a laundry list of values in me, but he never left my brother and I. He couldn’t properly care for us, but he was always with us. He didn’t run away from us. He didn’t know what to do and when to do it, but he allowed my grandparents, his parents, to take care of us and him while he was forever figuring it out.

He hated every minute of it, but he knew it was best. After my mother left, we were living in a shack that I vividly remember at the age of three because it had no working toilet. There were no light fixtures so Curtis would plug up a work light when we needed it. And I can’t exactly remember but I don’t think there was even running water. The shack looked very similar to the cover photo of this story. Even back when we lived there. Ours was bulldozed over years later but the one I’m pictured with was right beside ours. Imagine the same house a third smaller without all the trees and you have ours.

I remember one night getting out of the bed that we all slept in together to use the bucket we had as a bathroom and a rat running across my feet. I screamed and jumped back in the bed still urinating and it got on the sheets. It wasn’t too long after that that my grandmother, his mom, came to get me. He followed reluctantly with my brother shortly after.

Curtis suffered his self-inflicted sabotage for at least 36 of my 38 years of life until the day he died, just a few months shy of his sixty first birthday. I remember looking at him as he lay in the church a few days before the funeral and wondering if he was proud of me for defying his odds in life. He always told me what I couldn’t have and what I couldn’t be, but I was everything he didn’t think I’d be and more.

He didn’t know how to say “I’m proud of you,” “good job,” or “you did it!” He just had a way of asking me about my life over the years, and saying “alright then” that I took as his way of saying he was wrong about me, that he’s sorry for what he said and that he was indeed, proud of me as his daughter. I accept that that was his way and I believe he knew that I did and we both made peace with it.

He definitely stopped telling me what I couldn’t do or be once I did it and became it. He was an entire emotional and mental hurdle in life to jump within himself. Let alone the expected ones that we leap over on our journey to success. So in his own way, him believing in my downfall, as far back as I can remember, is how he gave me the grit and determination I have to be everything I dreamed and more. He gave me a will power to show him, but most importantly myself, that I was somebody!

Although I can assume he was proud, the assumption will never take place of the real words. So I call a truce with him based on what I feel like I knew. And with that, I loved him in a unique way that I don’t fully know how to explain, that only he and I understand. Just like our rare moments of laughing, singing and dancing when I was a little girl. And it’s enough to have the mental release I need to move forward in my continuous journey to becoming a better me. I hurt for him in a way that opens a floodgate of tears when I think about all that he missed in his sixty years of life. Too afraid to come out of his room and take a chance on himself. So I live for him to help ease the pain.

I cremated my father against the will of almost everyone in my family because he told us to. Black families don’t like the idea of cremation, especially black families in the south from the back woods of the country, so it was a struggle to get some to accept it but they had to in the end. My biggest reason for the cremation was never explained, but more understood between my father and I. It was because he hid himself from the world out of shame for who he’d become and I knew that.

When he was having a good day he would admit it; that he didn’t want people to see him like he was so he sheltered himself away until he could get on his feet. That day never came. So in his death, I would not allow people to see the version of himself that he hated. This was bigger than tradition. This was about my fathers dignity. Who he was as a man. For the people who hadn’t seen him since his better days, I wanted them to remember him for his better days. Not the laughing stock, “crazy man” they heard he’d become in his latter.

So my brother and I, uncles and aunts (his sisters and brothers), said our goodbyes before they turned his body to ashes. For anyone who didn’t accept my decision, when it was all said and done, my decision was for my father to accept and I know he did. No one else’s opinion outweighed his immortal gratitude for honoring him. I still have his ashes and plan to spread a little across the world as my way of showing him a better life than the one he knew. To help him shed the layers of humiliation that plagued him the majority of his days on this earth.

Father’s Day and Mother’s are traditionally celebrated as days of joy and appreciation for your parents but for someone like me, it’s been years of a facade. A fake forgiveness created by generational curses in black families that drown truths by pretending that “ the thing” doesn’t exist and hoping for the best. That is not real life. The psychological traumas we experience from a parent, the person we are supposed to trust most in life, can and will last a lifetime if you never take the time to process it.

If you can’t resolve your hurts with your parent(s) directly, you still have to forgive for your own true peace of mind. Forgiveness does not mean you condone what they did. It means you release it. You make the required steps towards “happiness, self-acceptance, and maturity.” I encourage you to read this article about forgiving your parents as it sums up why what I’ve done in the process of forgiving my father is such an important step to take in your life. We must realize our parents were hurting people too and therapy wasn’t as accepted in their time as it is in ours.

I pray that those of you who have hurt to liberate yourself from, receive the strength and determination to push through when it gets hard and when it becomes ugly. Because it will become both and then some. I believe in you, I encourage you and I welcome you to ask me anything that you think will help you achieve the level of happiness you deserve as you process this moment of your life. Feel free to comment below and go get the life that’s waiting for you!!