It's Father's Day Again But I Still Don't Remember My Mine...

It's Father's Day weekend again but I still don't remember mine.  While people are changing their FACEBOOK profile photos that show them smiling with their dad's in wedding gowns, I don't have one.  I don't have one of me in my high school or college graduation cap and gowns with him or one where my dad is holding my children or grandchildren.  There are no posed family photographs of us with silly smiles plastered across our faces.  There are very few photographs of my father and me at all.  This is because at age six, my father passed away.

When people debate how far back a child can remember, I know from personal experience that a very young child cannot remember much.  Or perhaps it is just me.  Maybe it is the way the mind protects a young child from remembering painful things.  You see, my father became sick when I was four years old and eventually a hospital bed was brought into our home for him to stay in for the remainder of his life.  But I don't even remember that.  My memories are not my own; they are the memories of other family members who have attempted to keep my father alive in my own memory for me.

It wasn't that growing up without a father was painful every day of my life because life goes on.  And for a young child, they move along with school, activities, friends and such.  It was always the important events in my life where his absence seemed so much more hollow.  However, once I became a parent and saw the interaction between my husband and children, I knew that I had missed out on much more.  I didn't understand that there is a bond between a father and child that is like none other.  He brings a sort of strength and stability to a child's life that they know they can always count on...forever.  I have seen how my children, as adults,  call to ask my husband for advice and Caitlin, who is now a wife and mother, herself, still climbs up into her daddy's lap for just a cuddle.  These are the things I did not know about growing up.  These are the things that all of my friends went home to at the end of the day.  If I had known, maybe my daily life would have been a little more painful.

It is Father's Day weekend again and I am left with a few photographs of my father, memories given to me by others but I am not dwelling on those facts.  Oh, I still stare at his face once in a while in those photographs that my sister has framed for me and try to figure who he was and what he was like.  But this weekend is for my husband and sons who have now become fathers.  I am preparing Sunday lunch for them and have bought my husband a present too.  He once told me that he wasn't my father and that I didn't have to buy him a present for Father's Day.  I asked him to indulge me since I had no one else to buy one for.  I also jumped on the band wagon with the FACEBOOK photograph, changing mine to one I found of my father and me; one that I really like, one that looks like a day I would have loved to remember...