HOPE. One of the most important words and yet, sometimes the smallest when facing any type of struggle in any point in anyone’s life. For some, hope is what keeps them grounded…for others, hope is what motivates them to achieve greatness…for me….hope is something that I know if I lose sight of, my world would fall apart.
After watching a Disney show with my daughter yesterday, I gained better insight on how powerful the concept and theme of hope can be. It plays on our emotions. Everyone can relate to this concept of hope as well all had to tap in to it at some point in life…unless we are just straight sociopaths….hm.
By definition, hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen; a feeling of trust; or to want something to happen or be the case. Synonyms include trust, anticipate, wish, bliss, pleasure, happiness, look forward to, expectation, optimism, anticipation, joy. Antonyms include sorrow, despair, misery, desolation, anguish, gloom, depression, despondency, and dejection.
Today my daughter completed a milestone. She attended her first day of kindergarten. Her excitement last night, while helping me make her lunch and helping me organize all the school supplies in to her brand new backpack was unforgettable. The joy she had surrounding these activities emulated that of Christmas Eve as she eagerly awaits Santa Clause’s arrival. We laughed, we joked, we hugged, we smiled, we tried on the book bag adjusting the straps several times to compensate for the weight of first day travels, we laid out her first day of school outfit, we jumped up and down a little…and talked about how excited we were that this was happening.
As I went to start the dishes that had collected in my sink from the days breakfast and dinner, I asked her if she wanted to call her father to share with him how excited she was. She declined. She excused herself from this uncomfortable obligation and asked if she could just watch High School Musical because “the dancing part is on mommy and this is my favorite.” I waited until I heard the song end while continuing to wash the dishes. I asked her again, “Are you sure you don’t want to call daddy and tell him about your backpack or your lunch you helped me pack?” “No, mommy, it’s okay.” I called her in to the kitchen and had about a ten minute conversation with her centralizing around her feelings relating to her relationship with her father. At one point she said, “Can we be done with this talking it is taking too long!” I said, “No, I want to try to figure out how I can help you and daddy be close like you and me.”
Hope.
She finally agreed to call him. We called twice, each time going straight to voice mail. I figured maybe he blocked my cell phone as he usually does when I try to hold him accountable for some inconvenience he has caused my daughter. But the house phone went straight to voicemail as well. After trying the house phone she said, “See, this is why I don’t want to call him. If he doesn’t answer he would just tell me to ‘hold on.’” I asked, “What do you mean?” She said, “Whenever I try to call him he is with his friends or his girlfriend and always tells me to hold on and I don’t like it.” I said, “Well, sometimes we call and he doesn’t say that.” She said, “Yah, so. Then he just doesn’t answer.” I said, “So now what?” She said, “Now, he is not part of our family anymore. He doesn’t want to answer me.”
At this moment I did what any mother would do. I made a mental note never to forget what her face looked like, what her tone sounded like, or what her words meant to her in this moment. Typically, I would try to repair this. I would try to salvage the string she is holding on to hoping that her father will eventually become more consistent in her young life. I tried to remember how I felt in this moment. The seething hate I had developed towards another human being, the feeling of rage that overcame me, the urge to act out and stop waiting for karma to step in, to force consequences upon him. I thought, do I text his girlfriend with whom he is inevitably with and say “Mike’s daughter is looking to share something exciting with him relating to her FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN, could you have him call us?” Or contact his mom and say, “If you know where Mike is, could you please remind him that he has a daughter who is starting Kindergarten tomorrow and we, as well as society, feels this is a big deal?” Then text messaging his friend and I suppose roommate, “Tell Mike to call his daughter now.” With each thought my attempts at messaging these people in polite ways, hiding the immense feelings of anger and disgust I had for her father increased. I recognized that I was losing control of a very important situation.
And then it occurred to me. Why am I not validating my daughter’s feelings? Why am I enabling a man who so effortlessly forgets his own daughter to spend time with his girlfriend for a quick get-away (from what life-responsibilities is the question at this point) disappointing her on their assigned Sunday together. Why am I allowing him to win, yet again? Why am I not encouraging my daughter, my sweet, kind, fearless daughter to express how she is feeling instead of trying to change the disappointment she has, yes, at 5, for her father? With all my training and knowledge, who am I supposed to protect? A grown man who continues to have difficulty with responsibilities, or a child?
At that point I stopped doing the dishes, which are still sitting in my sink. I turned off the teapot I was using to heat up water for the coffee I wanted to chill for tomorrow morning. I checked on the brownies I was making for my boyfriend’s birthday celebration tomorrow to make sure that if the timer went off I wouldn’t have to jump right up. I dried my hands. I went in to my daughter’s room and got her favorite fidget blanket and went back to the couch she was sitting on. I scooped her up and held her half on my lap, half on the couch. She threw her arm around my neck to half-hug me. She told me that this was another favorite part of the movie, again, when the characters break in to song-and-dance. We talked about how she is going to start dance next week and how excited she is for it. We talked about what school would be like and she asked if a little boy she befriends during orientation would be in her class. We spoke about how she is to go to the JCC camp after school, but that I would be there at 5:30PM on the dot to get her. She asked me if her best friend from Pre-K would be starting school tomorrow as well.
I held her, probably later than I should have as she had to wake up an extra 30 minutes early for kindergarten. She begrudgingly asked me to carry her in to bed then, if she couldn’t stay up later with me. I checked on her right before I went to bed and she was peacefully sleeping. When she woke up in the morning we did a little excited first day of school dance. She got dressed in her new outfit, her sparkly shoes, and decided that for the pictures we would take her hair could be down, but then that she wanted me to put her hair in pigtails.
She got herself a cereal bar, a squeezy fruit and a juice box, as she usually does for breakfast. She sat on the couch with my boyfriend to eat her breakfast and chit chatted (even though I kept interrupting to rush her because I didn’t want her to be late), while I finished getting ready. My boyfriend happily (something I am unaccustomed to) took out the Back-to-School sign I created for her and leaned it up against the front door. I took several pictures of her and then he again, happily, took pictures of her and me.
We drove to school, excited, watching other cars filled with children taking the same route. We then stood on her class line and talked about how excited she was. I met her teacher, and she smiled with her, sharing her name and introducing herself. I reminded the teacher that she will be staying for the aftercare program and she marked this down. Gabby smiled at me the whole time. We hugged and kissed goodbye a few times as we were both extremely excited about everything that was about to transpire. I waved to her a few times as the teacher led them in to the building.
As I left, I received two text messages….both from her father…asking if she was nervous and how her morning was.
The way I see it, this was an epic fail and a poor attempt at anything relating to fatherhood. I know that people get busy and life happens and sometimes the whole out of sight phenomena can become someone’s reality. She does not live with her father and perhaps he was unaware that this was the first day of school; however, she had been talking about it with him this past Sunday when they saw each other. He knows that school is this week because his niece is going in to kindergarten as well and started today. At some point, society, facebook, the news, more than likely reported that this week was a return to school week. I could not allow myself in this moment to believe he actually forgot.
And then, I called him. I asked him where he was last night. He denied that his phone was off. I told him I would send him screen shots of us trying to call. I asked him why the responsibility of reaching out to continue this parent-child relationship lay on the 5 year old child. I demanded an answer as to why he did not call her last night to inquire about how she felt about today. His response, “I got out of work, and forgot.” He did forget. That fucking asshole forgot. At this point, I had to go against my grain and go with the flow of how anyone else would have responded, felt, and reacted. I told him he was a horrible person. I told him that how dare he forget her, that I was no longer forcing her to want to be in this relationship with him, that I was done. That I would no longer force her to be emotionally abused by him and his inconsistencies. That twice in the last two weeks he forgot her. That he can justify it however he wants and sublimate his actions to appear as though they are acceptable. That it is none of my business if he goes on vacation or with whom he goes with but how dare he schedule these vacations around my daughter’s time with him. That how dare he ignore her. That he has until the end of today to decide how he is going to be in his life or he can take me to court and prove I am in contempt when I no longer allow him to see her because the inconsistency has finally caught up with her.
My daughter is me at age 5. She is smart beyond her years, she is lively, she is brilliant, she is kind, she is fair, she has a lot of insight and emotional intelligence….and I will be dammed if he breaks her or turns her bitter out of his own complacent point of view. To think that a woman he has known for less time than she has been alive will be put first is astonishing as a parent. As a mother, my hope for him is that he recognizes the horrible mistakes he has made. That he suffers emotionally for missing out on her first day of a huge milestone in her life. That he realizes how badly he fucked this up. But my hope for her is that she forgives him…but is not quick to forget how it felt to not have him there. And not so that she turns bitter and loses faith or hope or generalizes that all men or people will disappoint her…but so that she can understand that this is a one time thing with a one time person. That there will never be another person who does this to her as long as I can help it, because I will no longer allow it.
There are plenty of times in my career as a social worker that my clients or my employers or just general people have asked me why I went in to this field. I never quite knew how to respond. There wasn’t some magical thing or traumatic thing that happened to me in my childhood or as a teen, or even as a young adult that pushed me towards this area of work. Truth always is I am naturally intuitive with other people’s problems and feelings. It is more than likely the only area of life that makes sense to me…behavior.
Until today. Today, I realized that not only am I good at what I do for total strangers, but I now have hope and a purpose to be better than I was in order to protect my daughter. Hope showed me that by removing blinders to a cycle that was on the verge of repeating itself, I have prevented it. I am certain that this sounds grandiose and people can think “who does she think she is,” and that is fine. But what I can say, is that I got here by accident. I got here by watching a traditional TV show on the Disney Chanel. I got here by really trying to listen to the message they were sharing with the tween audience. I got here by listening to what my gut has been telling me from the beginning, and that is….he is selfish, narcissistic, and sociopathic and someone like that I would seriously try to protect my child from. Any parent would…yet, it was difficult to see that he would act in this way towards his daughter. I hoped that he would put her first, I hoped that he would one day wake up and get it.
For this situation, I am unsure if anyone would argue with me with regards to the idea that hope is lost. Yet, out of this dramatically decaying attribute to hope, strength, courage, and wisdom grew.
And for that, hope is probably the most powerful concept we have within our society.