The repetitive complaint of a separated parent

March 13, 2005, a Sunday, was like so many Sundays in the period 2003 – 2007. Well, every second. After picking up my daughters on a Friday afternoon, I would return them to her mother on a Sunday afternoon.

It was always difficult.

Without exception, having helped them settle in with mom, including a healthy delivery talk, I would sadly walk away accepting what it was (that they wouldn’t be able to be with me full-time) or, especially in the case of longer stays or absences, I would leave and just be a minute on the road and crying.

Those times when he was crying, praying to God and being as serious as he could be. It was like an immediate sense of separation, loneliness washed over me, for the umpteenth time, where I would once again learn that God was all I had. It took me so many times to desolate nothingness. However, I never really got used to it.

I came to a place whenever I recognized, with my Lord, that I could bear this.

I don’t know how to explain how my relationship with God grew so much in a time of so much anguish. It sounds bad to say that God was all he had, but in truth there were so many times that I found myself literally thrown into that dying pit. And there, in the background with me, was my Lord.

Church certainly became a distraction and serving in leadership was a way to get me to focus on something positive, but there was nothing to distract me on that half-hour drive home, and on many occasions I was just sorry for what I did. I was missing. , and especially how my daughters might be missing me. This last thought often haunted me, but it was always reassuring to know when I called them later that they were always okay.

On the day in question, my diary tells me that my youngest daughter looked back and I seriously questioned, as it says, ‘Where am I!’ I only mention that saying goodbye that day was ‘very difficult’.

Long stays were different. Having my girls for a week over the holidays was great, but something strange was happening the day before I brought them back: I was always emotional. Sometimes moody, mostly worried, always thoughtful. It was just another iteration of a complaint I experienced hundreds of times in that nearly four-year season, only more intense. It would be nothing for me to be sadly depressed for two or three days or so before seeing them again.

It was a tragic irony for me that I probably took my three daughters for granted while in my first marriage, but then, when it ended, I fell in love with them in a new way through their frequent absences from my presence. he just didn’t know how to adjust, apart from delving into God; To say that it was a saving grace would be a cosmic understatement.

Why do I write this kind of stuff? A love letter to my daughters – Dad will always love you. A reminder to myself that even though I’ve gotten through that season, there are people who are making it just as hard as I am, but now. A stimulus to those who are related so that they do not give up; You’re not alone. May this love letter open the eyes of the hearts that God intends to see it, especially of husbands like me, taking for granted the same blessings before my/our eyes.