When Dad Isn't Everything You Want Him to Be

I heard about the things that some fathers did to their daughters via the Internet, TV and radio and I was appalled! Being that I came from a strict household, I was sheltered from some things until I got out on my own. How could a father or stepfather do such things to his own children? Was there not enough women for them to be intimate with? Was violating a child's innocence empowering, dare I say it, spiritual for these lost men? Why were some of these fathers' minds so twisted? Could these wounded boys, who grew up to become fathers, be the result of their own messed up family traditions?

When does the cycle stop? When does the sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse and other forms of abuses, stop?! Whether it is the father who walks into his daughter's room after hours to play so-called, Show and Tell or the father who doesn't say two words to his children everyday when he comes home from work, but "Hi and Bye," there is something brewing in that home, something dark, ugly and eventually it will manifest itself as the child matures.

There are those dads who have sold out to the devil, plain and simple, no room for God, period. Then there are those fathers who have some allegiance to a spiritual being even if they don't go to church all the time, but they work for self--"It's my life...I call the shots not God." There isn't much difference spiritually between the two, they both work for temporal, selfish pleasures. The soul-selling dad who abuses his daughter, "It isn't so bad...it's not like I do it all the time..." the father reasons away his shameful actions. His daughter, "That's just my dad...he's always like that...it's okay." The unavailable dad, "His mother will take him to the game, I'm busy. I don't want to talk to my daughter about her problems, I'm watching the game." So while the dad closes his ears to his family's hurts, there is an evil, a great heaviness on the heart of his loved ones, some would describe those feelings as "not feeling like my dad loves me." Daughters look to men and/or boys outside the home to fulfill their need of a father's love. They ask, "Am I cute? What do you think of me?" Of course, a boy/man hot in the pants will say everything she wants to hear.

The lost dad may have had a father that didn't love him or his own mother may have said she hated him, and now he has grown up cold, the father, who can't hug a woman (or child) without having strange emotions. He can't disassociate the ugliness he has encountered in the past to sincerely love anyone in the present. One father thinks that love is physical touch including in the most private of places, another father thinks that buying children things is all you have to do, and still another thinks that loving his son or daughter means, "I listen, but that's all I'll do! Now go play!"

Daughters by design are talkers. They bring out all sorts of emotions in their parents. They challenge them to think and to do more with their lives. They want to converse with their fathers not only about how much something cost so he can buy it, but they also want to understand those odd feelings they experience for a guy and what to do about them. She wants to know what men and boys think about and what should she expect from them.

Where are the dads? They can't be doing or saying too much by the shear number of little girls walking around in mini-skirts and showing their cleavage and butt on the Internet!? When she becomes a mother, she could use a tidbit of advice on raising her son. But where is dad? Watching the game? Working? Still hanging out with his boys? Sleeping with Ms. Jane, Ms. Ann...? Why doesn't her dad make himself available to his daughter for a real father daughter relationship? Why aren't more dads educating themselves on what a healthy father and daughter relationship is? Will dad direct his daughter to help if he can't answer her questions? Or will he shun her away, beat her for unexplained feelings for a boy, cuss, yell and scream about how dumb she is because she can't seem to excel in her studies or make good life decisions?

A father will look at another man's daughter swing around a pole, open her legs for a magazine without a thought. He will watch a perverted movie of someone else's daughter doing some of the most despicable things known to man, and he's okay with that. But what if it is his daughter one day entertaining the men? Some fathers are allowing their children to do immoral things, right now, for money--everything from selling drugs to selling their bodies without conscience. "I need the money, " he reasons. So what happens when family secrets get out? Someone has got to pay and a father just may end up paying with his life--jail, family breakup, financial disaster, health issues, etc. As someone once told me when talking about certain male relatives and their children, "God don't like ugly." Every man who is a father in my own family has had to pay for their sins in one way or another and if that wasn't sufficient enough, the children paid and some are still paying for the sins of their fathers!

When I was a child, my own father was what anyone would call a "man's man" but he was a quiet man, so much in fact he didn't have too much to say about anything to us children. He worked a good job with good pay for over 40 years, but he didn't have time for chitchat, (if you're from Pittsburgh you know what that means-lol) you brought the conversation to him, and he said, "Hmm." that was it! If you talked to him, especially when he wasn't open to hearing you, there was going to be problems. He rarely came down the stairs to greet anyone visiting our home. Male relatives who visited went up to his room to talk, but never for long, their wives stayed downstairs and chatted with my mom. My dad didn't talk on the phone either--not even to his mom unless prompted by his wife. To this day, as much as I would like to just shoot the breeze with my dad, I know my place. He was strict back then when I was a child, then eased up a little in his golden years, but there are still many aspects to his personality that don't welcome any bonding. When I talked with him about my upbringing, he didn't have too many words except, "So you're trying to blame me for your decisions in life?" Yes and no is really all I could say, besides he was the first example of a male figure in my life that I was given of how a father should treat a daughter, but I guess I was asking too much.