Viewing My Father Through a Different Lens

By Mesha

Among the greatest blessings a person can enjoy is an intimate, loving relationship with their parents throughout the latter's lifetime. This was one great blessing that eluded me, especially with regard to my late father, who left the world around a quarter a century ago, when I was in my early 30s. Our relations, for the most part, were strained, and remained so right until his passing. The fact is that my father and I hardly knew each other. We were to each other almost like strangers.

In any relationship between two or more people, each of the persons contributes to the relationship’s unfolding. By what they bring to the relationship, in terms of attitudes, emotions, thoughts, words and actions, each plays a crucial role in determining how it turns out to be. This being so, both my father and I were responsible for our relationship (or, actually, virtual ‘non-relationship’) turning out the way it did.

Often, though, one or both persons in a two-person relationship that becomes frayed or even hostile considers the other person to be entirely responsible for the deterioration of the relationship, while ignoring completely their own role in the affair. They regard the other person’s acts of commission and omission (real and/or imaginary) as the sole cause for the souring of the relationship. They ignore their own culpability in the matter and consider themselves as innocent victims of the other person’s misdoings, as having been wronged by the latter for no fault of their own. Sometimes, a person can even derive a perverse sort of delight in obsessively detesting the other person, whom they blame for their unhappy predicament.

This is precisely the case with how for a very long time I viewed my father. This only contributed to the further deterioration of our relationship (which may have even been something that I consciously wanted and willed to happen). The fact of the matter is that I actually wanted nothing to do with my father, and so, the worse our relationship became, the better I felt. Or so it seems to me, when I look back on our relationship that came to an end several years ago when my father died.

Today, though, I would like to think of my father and the relationship between him and me differently. I am now able and enthusiastically willing to acknowledge the many good things he did for me, something that I refused to do when he was alive. I can now see that it was because of his hard work for his family that we were able to enjoy an upper-middle class lifestyle that one could almost call ‘lavish’. Because of the job that he worked very hard at, we were able to access comforts that are impossible for me given my present financial condition.

Knowing now, from my own personal experience, how difficult it is to earn even a single penny, I am today in a much better position to appreciate what my father did for me in terms of providing for my material needs and, beyond that, comforts, and for which I ought to be grateful. My gratitude to him ought to be further enhanced when I consider what an effort earning an honest livelihood is.

Today, I can look back and view my father through a different lens—through the lens of gratitude and appreciation for the many things that he did for me. How different this is from viewing a person from the lens of their real and/or imagined negative acts of commission and omission!

Consciously recognizing my father’s efforts and commitment for providing the material standard of living that I enjoyed as a child, I can now say, “Papa, thank you for all you did for me! Please forgive me for my part in the way our relationship unfolded. I forgive you for your part in this whole affair. May you be blessed wherever you may now be!”