Monday, April 9, 2012

Losing A Daughter


It’s not a case of death taking her from me. She got just old enough to decide she didn’t want me in her life. Old enough but not mature enough. She didn’t make this decision on her own. She had help from someone who convinced her that I am despicable, ruthless, and hateful. It was the surest way for her father to avenge my leaving him and reassure himself that I was again, as always, in the wrong. Vulnerable in the midst of adolescence and her parents divorcing, my daughter was likely an easy sell to his way of thinking. But five years later, it’s still the same. She’s still gone, still lost to me.

The hardest part is that each time I try to reach out to her to no avail - hear news of her through her sisters - think about her on holidays we used to celebrate together - I get visited by my old friends, grief and tears. I don’t like it when those two come to call, but they show up anyway. Somehow their mission must be essential. While they’re here, I am a bit slower, more tired, and would prefer some of my day be spent curled into a fetal position inside my closet. I look around and notice that God is nowhere in sight, leaving me to entertain these exacting guests all by myself. Or so it seems.

The loss of my daughter was collateral damage from other, previous losses which cast their domino effect on various parts of my life. When I was just a child, I lost certain things, certain birthrights – trust, security, and self-esteem, to name the most critical - that led to bad decisions as I got older. Unfortunately, one of the most devastating of these decisions was my marrying a man who guaranteed the impatience and unkindness that hurt yet was comfortably familiar to me. I don’t blame myself for this choice - how could it have been otherwise?

Thank God, literally, this is all history now, and I’m finally a grown-up who’s learned to take care of herself. And let go the past. But the wreckage has remained to haunt me. In these years since my daughter’s rejection of me, I’ve been left to wonder... Did she ever love me? Will she ever want me in her life again? Who is she now? Will she ever be truly happy if she has been brainwashed to hate? Like her father, are there portions of her stuck in a black-and-white world, incapable of change? How will her loss of me – even if by her own choice – hurt her in the end? And how will it hurt others whom she loves or who love her?

My thought was to persist, to never give up. But after five years of separation and no response to the letters, cards, gifts, emails, and text messages I’ve sent, I am tired. So tired that I’ve finally decided to release her to live in her way, without me. We may or may not have a relationship in the future, but finally and with some relief, I will let God decide about that. Like all our children, she was only mine on lending basis for a time anyway - too short a time, I feel.

I do recall, and very clearly, spending years throwing my love into people who were like dark and bottomless wells. The love disappeared into the blackness, gone forever, and still there was no water in the bucket to quench my thirst. It has been nearly impossible to think of my daughter, once so joined to me, as such a person. But the years of grieving have changed me, given me perspectives I couldn’t grasp before. This may sound like gloomy resignation, but it is not. It is acceptance of reality, and once again I thank God for it. I set her free, and I am freer myself to give love to people who can return it. Life will have its way with her and with me. Change is good.

With humility I realize that finding some serenity about losing my daughter was always within my reach, but I was not ready to see it. “Send them love everyday,” said Pearl, a 77-year-old friend whose daughter returned to her life recently after a 12-year absence. How simplistic, I think to myself at first. Then I see. How willing have I truly been to work on forgiving my daughter and my ex-husband, as I’ve done before with my parents and myself? Not very, I’d have to respond. But therein lies the key to peace and freedom about this heartbreaking loss, I feel certain.

So now I’m saying those words – “I send you love” – each day, liking it or not, meaning it or not. Experience has shown me that with willingness and persistence, someday I will be fully sincere as I repeat them. Someday very soon, I think. Maybe I already am... perhaps since the day I started doing it. It’s so simple and yet the last thing I try. Forgiveness. The balm for wounds of any sort, including even the profoundest, losing a daughter.

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