They are yellowing, all the vintage photos of sprayed bangs and oversized sweatshirts. In their background we see furniture now considered antique and labels of pop culture that make us question what we were thinking.
There are black and whites. Wedding days where lace graced shoulders and arms interlocked. Army hats over crew cuts. And our friends as slobbering pudge-balls, almost as unrecognizable as they are adorable turning upside down on laps.

One after another reels through my line of vision until I stop. A lump plagues the width of my throat where I’m too good at holding things in. Pain has taught me this, yet I’m just learning it about myself. How good I am at constructing emotional walls, barriers so that no one will see what I think will make them leave. These pictures, this isn’t the whole book of our lives. We are picking and choosing and hiding what we don’t want known.

What do you do on a day that celebrates a person who only gave you heartache, or bruises? Big and bleeding under the surface, yellowed around the edges of backs and cheeks, like the images we splatter across social media. How do you survive all the odes and dedications for someone who may have left you, or was called home before you were ready? What about the guy whose entire life was a lie, who called you stupid, never had time to play, or whom you never met? How do you get through the barbeques when you spent your entire childhood believing you were never enough?

The daddy wound. It runs so deep that few of us escape it.

Even the good ones who get on their knees to tower Legos sky-high, do skipping races, throw laughing toddlers in the air and catch them, and say “I love you” every night don’t do it right all the time. They lose their cool now and again, work too long one day, and forget how it looks to love well. 

There’s just something about fathers. And I wonder if it’s designed this way. If this deeper longing that never releases it’s grip is because we are constantly in need of Someone more.

My knees bobbed, I swayed as the drum beat into the core of my soul. Words fell off my tongue in a sea of a thousand more when I heard Him whisper to me.
“I. I Am. I have never missed a second of your life. When you thought no one else saw you fill those tissues with tears, I did. When emptiness grated relentlessly against your heart, I knew. When everyone else abandoned you, I didn’t.”

Our stories matter. Our daddy stories matter. There’s One who wants to write new pages, and remind us of how He’s in the margins of all the chapters before as the Father of the Fatherless.