This Year: Happy Father's Day!

us at the Hyattsville Mom's Summer Picnic last weekend

This Father's Day, I get to celebrate Lily's relationship with her father. It is an amazing turn of events from last year.

I see the way he looks at her.  Or, better yet, the way she looks at him.  I see the way they play together.  The way he makes her laugh.  The way he almost never forgets what I need at the store now.  The way he is always willing to jump up and take care of my every whim and need, because I am taking care of the baby.  The way he finds new ways to share the responsibility when he knows I need it.

One day last week, I was having a bad day, and he said "I'll go get you a pizza, if that will help make it better."  He was sharing giggles with her not long after (when Miss Lily Bean should have been sleeping), so that I could have a few minutes to myself.  Finally.  Here is a man who would leave early on a work trip just so that I could invite my friends over one weekend who might not otherwise come over if he were home.  Instead, he left on Monday, so that he could take is daughter to her first baby dance and then hopefully spend the morning with me at work.

I could ask him for anything right now, and he would go and do it, because that is what you do when your wife is a permanent boob.

Every week, I am presented with situations (like the examples above) that make me shake my head and say to myself, "They were wrong.  They were so wrong."   Since deciding to reconnect with my husband seven months ago, I have lost a lot of friends.  I had just cut ties with some people completely, because they failed to approach the situation with maturity, becoming very angry and disrespectful.  I have had to try to figure out where I stand with a few other folks, as people I thought were my friends held me at a distance, no longer responding to emails or keeping me at the end of a ten-foot pole.  I wanted to make sure that years didn't pass and Lily grow up without these people in her life just because they needed time to see this change as something positive. Time, I was most certainly willing to give it to people who needed it.  Alas, it was time to realize that those people who held me at a distance were no longer my friends either.   Some of the people I considered my best friends will have never met Lily.  It makes me sad, but they are within their rights to choose.

The expectation by most of my friends was that under no circumstances (i.e. if presented with evidence that he was not a sociopath as thought) should I ever reconnect with the father of my baby.  Many of my friends felt that I owed it to them to not give Lily's dad a chance to be her father should he come forward and make an effort to right the wrongs.  I did not owe it to people to let them decide for Lily how involved her father was going to be in her life.  That is my decision until Lily can make it for herself, and my decision alone.

How could people who cared for the well being of my daughter really want her to live a life without her father, should he actually be a good person?  How could people who cared for me wish that I would stay a single mother despite evidence that he actually might have just been going through some traumatic crap that could genuinely be sorted through with time and in therapy? I understand more than any of my former friends the trauma Lily and I both went through.  I was there.  I also read dozens of books about personality disorders while trying to figure out what happened.  I know my husband is genuine.

What I did owe them was my continued participation in the religious communities that I built.  I showed up week after week and month after month, even though I did not want to.  I owed them my friendship.  I owed them my time.  I owed them my love.  I owed them a place in Lily's life.  I owed them to to be happy.  I owed them my resources and support when they needed it.  All of which I was making sure to provide.

They were so wrong to expect me to forbid him this opportunity to shine as a husband and father.  I am very sorry that they are missing out.

So, for this Father's Day, Lily and I got the best gift.  We got the most awesome Daddy in the world.  Sure, it wasn't a perfect journey, but it was ours.  And, we're better people for it in the end.