Father's Day

Sunday, after work, I visited Mom and Dad for Father’s Day. None of my other siblings had come for the day. My parents had watched my nephew the evening before, and my sister did not come to pick him up because she said she was sick. My parents brought her son back to her, along with lunch they had made for everyone who did not come. Since they were in the area, they brought lunch to my other sister as well. This enraged me. My sisters could not bother to get up and come visit. My parents should not be the ones driving around catering to everyone. We ended up having a three-and-a-half-hour conversation about life and choices and parenting and disappointment and resentment and love and what it means to be alive. We all became emotional. It was a beautiful evening despite the disappointment.

I emailed a friend I once loved to tell him Happy Father’s Day. I did it with the purest of intentions—a meaningful sentiment from one friend to another. He emailed me back, and he and his family are in Edisto. He sent me three photographs: an entire rainbow on the backdrop of the ocean with his girlfriend and youngest son, the beach and ocean with grey clouds upon a periwinkle-blue sky, and his three other children standing in the sand. It brought up feelings of bitterness. It felt like salt in the wound. Why does it still ache? Rejection. I still feel rejected by him after all these years. He rejected me in the past, and I always hoped he would love me again. But, life moves on. People move on. His girlfriend is beautiful and his kids look happy. I also felt jealous, because he is in Edisto. I have never been able to afford to go, and there he is with his happy family. This is an unfair assumption. No family is perfect, and no one is happy all of the time. He is a good person, and I think he overcompensates to be kind to me because he knows that he unintentionally hurt me. It is time that I accept our relationship is what it is. He was there for me during an extremely vulnerable time in my life, and he never betrayed my trust. Just because he chose someone else does not mean I am not worthy of love. Everything I need is inside of my Self. All I must do is surrender to it and allow myself the comfort of fulfillment.