Picture: Gramps, loving on his granddaughters (a very present male figure for my girls when Tony was gone)
Sometimes you just miss your guy.
My heart would sometimes ache when I saw dads holding their babies in carriers and kissing them on their heads in the store. Tony didn’t get that with Eila. Yes, he gets it now and I am thankful for that. But he missed a lot. And it hurt a lot. I tried to block out emotions sometimes, simply out of a need to emotionally survive, I felt I only had so much in my emotional bank and had to protect it to have enough to care for my girls and myself. I couldn’t let myself think too hard about the hard. But as a counselor I know, this isn’t the healthiest or best choice. If you don’t let it out, it will force itself out. When you least expect it. Like when you see a dad kissing his baby in the store, clearly taking his babe on a little dad- daughter date. Or when someone posts a picture of their family, complete with dad and baby together. We didn’t get that in its entirety with Eila. She spent most of her first nine months with me.
My reflections on all of this? See the good God has in the moment. Cry out to him in the hard. Let it be okay to not be okay. And find someone you really trust to share the hard with. Yes, Eila didn’t get Tony for the first nine months. It was lonely and I cried sometimes and we missed him. But while she didn’t get Tony, we had a crew of dads from church who held her, loved her, calmed her, snuggled her. She had her Gramps. She had uncles. She had real aunties (by blood) and adopted aunties (my girlfriends) who loved her and loved us in a million ways I could never even count. She wasn’t forgotten.
So I guess my challenge is: do you know a family who has a missing person? Who has a gap in it somehow? For us, it was deployment that took our Tony away for awhile. How could you love and serve a family who needs it today? A meal? A text? A coffee? Call someone (or zoom) and listen while someone vents? With COVID maybe we have to be more creative.
These little things made ALL the difference to us and I am thankful to every person who stepped in to serve our family.
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