(ThySistas.com) Growing up, my father and I had a distant relationship. We were always in each other’s peripherals but never really connected. It has been a source of pain for me that I didn’t realize until I got married, started a family, and began to reconnect with him. I never knew that one relationship could have such a major impact on my life. I knew that psychologists place a huge emphasis on your relationship with your parents especially your mother to explain some disorders. However, I never realized that a girl’s/woman’s relationship with her father can have some significant effects on your dating relationship.
As I said my relationship with my father was distant. More like we were acquaintances that would meet from time to time and catch up. For starters, my parentage wasn’t quite as traditional as most would like. A teenage mother and a freshly discharged U.S. Marine are where my story begins and no it is not a source of shame. My parents were hard working people who had flaws like everybody else and at the end of the day it didn’t work out. Yet here I am. Proof that at one point in time their love and passions for each other ran high.
When I was growing up, I could count the number of times that I saw my father on one hand…maybe two if I really tried. And no, he wasn’t a dead-beat dad. His career took him different places and kept him on the road not to mention having to support me and my sister from another relationship. I didn’t really understand back then and just accepted it as it was. I was still being looked after, going to school, growing up like any other little black girl so it was no skin off my nose. The desire to be close to him started when I was in middle school. Junior high school is an awkward time in any young girl’s life. During this time, we start looking at the other gender and deciding what type of relationships we want to have. Now of course, we never have any of the particulars nailed down by this point, but we have the basic gist of what we want in a relationship. Most of the time those wants, and desires come from a television screen because those are the images that are placed in front of us every day.
However, there are some of us who are lucky enough to watch their parents in a happy (or some version of it) and healthy marriage. I never had that opportunity…ever. I never saw either of my parents happy in a relationship. There was always somebody who almost made the cut but then we never saw them again. Or they were relegated to either of my parent’s B-squad for romantic partners and forced into the friend zone with no hope for respite. Back then, I never questioned why they never married. I never questioned why I never saw my mother in a healthy and fulfilling relationship. I never questioned why I never saw my dad being affectionate toward a woman that was not related to him. It just…was what it was.
Now that I’m in my second marriage, I wish I could have seen that. I wish I had seen what a decent relationship looked like and learned how to function in one. I have found that I can be aloof, seem unaffected by everything going on in my relationship. When in reality, I am losing every little piece of mind I have about the situation. I wish that I could have learned to be a better teammate with my partner and that when your backs are against the wall, it’s you and that person against the world. Watching my parents, I learned to operate independently from my partner, seek my own (or an elder’s) council for major decisions, and be an island for emotion.
I always find it funny how when I was younger, I would boast that having that closeness with him didn’t matter because I would be ok. Now, I know I needed him and that closeness more than ever.
Staff Writer; Jessieca Carr
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