We went to church in the afternoon while I left a roast slow cooking at home. After we ate and I had served the coffee I asked my parents, “Why did you raise us the way you did?”
Of course there was some uneasy shuffling and I knew they were both thinking “this is exactly why we don’t visit her!”
My mother surprised me however. She said very matter of factly, “If it were today, you would have been taken away from us.”
I looked at my father and he said “I was raised that way and turned out okay and figured you would too.”
To them, it was an explanation. There was to be no more of an explanation, but it was the beginning of a new relationship with my father. There was a slight shift at first from me being a little girl to a woman whom he could talk with instead of talking at.
It was one of the biggest healing incidents with my father I had had to date. My frustration and the feeling of being isolated from him changed to a more reasonable father/daughter relationship. It was more reasonable in that he began to ask me about projects, and sadly there were typically construction projects I would do around the house and nothing personal, but it was a step in the right direction.
