My father’s girlfriend pulled her car into a driveway, and I heard the gravel crunch underneath. I’d been disappointed—and a little relieved—when we stepped onto the train station platform an hour earlier to find her standing there without my father.
“There wasn’t enough room in the car for all of us” was her explanation as we tried stuffing our two backpacks into the shoebox-sized trunk of her tiny French car. “You have so many things,” she commented as we pushed our bags down.
I tried not to be annoyed.
The gravel driveway circled a stone fountain, and beyond it was a three-story stone home that looked like it could be on the cover of a French travel brochure. The Loire River moved by slowly behind the house. If I wasn’t feeling my heart race and my stomach turn a little, I’d have thought I’d arrived in a picturesque paradise.
Girls came running out. My baby sister was now six years old, with a two-year-old little sister of her own. Behind them walked my almost seventy-year-old father, looking more gray and frail than he did the last time I saw him.
We’d traveled a lot of miles to this French schoolhouse turned home and studio. To the moment when my husband would meet my father. Derek’s height and broad shoulders were more noticeable as he unfolded himself from the French-sized minicar. As my father approached us, Derek stretched out his hand for a handshake.
“Hello. Nice. To. Meet. You.” Derek directed his words with a loud staccato, as if the language barrier could be overcome with increased volume. I could tell Derek wanted to do right by me, defend me, stand up for me, look my father in the eye in an Old West kind of way to say that he knew. He knew that my father hadn’t called for years at a time. That he pushed me aside like a disposable daughter. That he had other children he cared for more. I was proud of Derek’s motives but wanted him to not be so big and loud. Not so American.
Despite my husband’s chivalrous attempts, my father wasn’t going to engage in a conversation about my childhood. Especially not right there on the gravel drive. Perhaps never. Besides, Derek’s too much of a peacemaker, too charming to not warm up to anyone quickly. Within a few hours, he had two little French girls swinging from his American superhero arms.
The conversations in the days that followed were awkward as we discussed typical getting-acquainted topics: Derek’s family, our jobs, where and how we met. These were conversations I could picture if we had been assigned to this family through a random foreign-study program, but not with my father and sisters. The disconnect between what was and what should have been made all of our words sound echoey, reverberating back to us, reminding us we were saying the right things, but to people who should have already known the answers.
We skipped around anything of substance, anything about my relationship with this foreign family, at least. Sitting at the lunch table after a savory meal of coq au vin and red wine, we talked about the French health care system and tax rate. About the amount of maternity leave a Frenchwoman qualified for and the child-care expenses that were covered while she worked.
As days went by, I displaced my unsettled feelings by becoming increasingly annoyed at a six-year-old who was throwing frequent fits. Now that I have my own children, I recognize my sister’s multiple meltdowns as a combination of exhaustion from an interrupted schedule and the tension we brought with us into her home. At the time I found her to be simply spoiled.
“Why don’t you go with her?” my father asked as my screaming sister pulled my sleeve to go up to our father’s third-story bedroom.
It was four days into our stay, and she was feeling fully comfortable expressing herself with her foreign company. Our conflict had escalated over the last few minutes. I had no desire to see the bedroom he shared with a woman half his age and was a little annoyed that this six-year-old daughter of his thought she could boss me around. She got more agitated as she continued to plead, and I got more annoyed as I continued to say no.
Until our father stepped in and asked me to give in to her. My jaw dropped a little. Did anyone ever say no to this child?
“She is just a child,” he reasoned.
“Just a child”? Did he really want to talk about “just a child”? To go there? I felt the blood rush to my head. How about a child who needed a father every day of her life? Who never threw a tantrum in front of him, not because she was perfect, but because he was never there to see it? A girl who needed affirmation that she was indeed beautiful, talented, and worth paying attention to? A girl who needed to hear that she deserved to be loved and to choose her relationships wisely? A girl who required wisdom, protection, and guidance from her father?
Really, “just a child”? I could tell him about “just a child.” I wanted to scream it all at him. But I knew the six-year-old next to me didn’t need to hear me say those things to her father. I wanted to protect her from the confusion of my own childhood, so I held it in.
The most maddening part was the disappointed look I felt he was giving me. A look that implied, How could you treat this six-year-old girl so poorly? With such immaturity? Aren’t you the adult here?
I got up and stormed onto the balcony, where Derek sat watching the river.
“How did that go?” He’d overheard the power struggle the last few minutes. A struggle between sisters separated by twenty years in age, opposing cultures, different languages, and most blatant to me, different amounts of their father’s attention. Derek’s flippant tone told me he didn’t understand the nuance involved. Flopping down in the chair next to him, I looked out at the river and seethed.
That night I slid under the covers of the antique queen bed in the guest room. My anger had tapered down to a low-grade fever of hurt. The grief that was underneath it bubbled up and took over. I slipped my arms around Derek and let his chest muffle my sobs.
“What’s going on?” he started to ask, but stopped himself just as the words came out. There was no real answer because there was no definitive question. The grief was for what could have been, what should have been, and what would never be. We had passed the point of repair. I would never get the daddy from my childhood whom the girl in me still longed for. I had to know how to live in the shape I was in. To move forward with a husband who was willing to put his arms around me and hold me tight for as long as I needed. With a God who allowed the pain to be there and was always willing to love me through it. It didn’t make sense, but it was time for me to be the grown-up and forgive.
A few days later, we pushed our backpacks into the trunk of the minicar to head back to the train station. As Derek said good-bye to the girls, my father pushed a roll of bills into my hand. “For your time in Barcelona,” he said.
I wanted to squeeze out the words, “I forgive you,” but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure he thought he needed forgiveness, and I didn’t want to stir up tension just as we were leaving. I wanted to be done. I would need to let the burdens fly off me in private. To let go of the anger for my sake, for my future family’s sake, on my own. Forgiveness was about me letting go. It really had little to do with him.
A quick hug and a kiss on the cheek, and we were pulling out of the gravel driveway and then on the train to Barcelona, where Derek and I would sleep at my dad’s apartment after staying out dancing until four in the morning. Where we’d have dinner with my former babysitter and her family and walk down La Rambla next to people who looked like they could be my cousins. Where we ate steaming calamari under the palm trees in the ancient Plaça Reial and drank espresso in cafés tucked between cobblestones in the Barri Gòtic, surrounded by the shadows of my ancestors and a cultural heritage I would never really know. Where I was ready to start living out of God’s legacy. A legacy of forgiveness and love.