ABW Part 4: Never Knew a Father's Love

If you have been keeping up with my blog spots, you know that I have taken up residence in Faithville in search of the meaning of my life. Jesus is the Sheriff of this new town. LOL Ok, Ok... I'm going on with the point. I have been soul searching... Why was I born? Why during this time? No such journey can really be complete SANS self-introspection. I have had to search myself... really, stop everything...really, think long and hard about my life. I wasn't kidding in my thanksgiving blog post about doing a full-body-cavity search... figuratively of course..no worries...LOL My parents never got married. I don't know exactly why but I know that my father tried to control my mother with his money... bad, bad, idea. My father was a man of means ...well, "black people" means...LOL meaning he was a honorably discharged veteran who had a good government job (he worked at the post office), he had good benefits, he owned his own home, he had amassed a considerable savings, with stock options and bonds (totalling well over half a million dollars). He had some money. Without giving too many details (I tell the whole story in the "No Stranger to Pain" chapter of my upcoming Speak Life Book), my father had made a unilateral decision that my mother could not be trusted with money. She had made too many poor financial decisions and frankly, he shirked his responsibilities. He didn't pay child support and he didn't help out as much as he should have... as much as he COULD have. My father wasn't hurting for money. Suffice it to say, I suffered terribly as a child. My mother hauled my father to court (as well she should have) and he was so determined for her to not have his money, that he denied being my father... that's just the real. A real shame too. Needless to say, we did the whole blood test thing and he died before we got the results. My mother had established paternity (of course, I was his child. I look just like him.) And all the money, he had FOUGHT SO hard to protect - landed smack dab in the middle of my mother's hands... that dear reader is IRONY at its finest and a whole nother story. Sidebar: Money in the wrong hands can be a curse... and I'll just leave it at that. OK! Enough of my dysfunctional family... The point I really wanted to make today is... I never knew a father's LOVE. My father was a military man. He was strict. When he did come around, he was always barking orders at me to line up my shoes, get my room clean, lose weight... nothing positive. EVER! There weren't any father and daughter dances. He didn't come to any parent teachers conferences. He didn't sit with me and do homework. My art work wasn't on his wall... My picture wasn't on his refrigerator. My father never told me that he loved me. Never. As you can imagine, by this admission alone, I was horrible at love. In my life, I never had one "good" man truly love me...truly... unconditionally... Just LOVE ME... until I met Jesus. He loved me... Like the Shemar Moore character in Tyler Perry's Movie Diary of a Mad Black Woman: "Jesus loved me past my pain." HE DID! He loved me with the love of a thousand good men. He really did. He took away my secret shame, low self-esteem, and self-hatred. As I search for the deeper meaning of my life, I don't search for a father's love anymore. Jesus put it in my heart. I didn't even realize how deeply I had been hurt by the way I grew up until God showed me. God saved me... in more ways than one.