I have known all my life that I wanted to be the father of daughters. I dreamed of the day I would hear my daughters tell my wife when they grew up they wanted to marry their daddy. And, that no matter how hard my wife tried to explain to the young little mind that this just couldn't be and that she would just have to settle for someone just like daddy, my wife would eventually have to resign in frustration to letting our dear little girl, to whom she already would have known she had lost my heart to, would figure it out on her own that mommy was the only girl who would ever own the privilege of marrying daddy.
Let me start way back as far as I can remember. When I was in kindergarten, one day my teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. Of course, the little girls wanted to be teachers, nurses, secretaries or moms and the boys all wanted to be soldiers, policeman, fireman or astronauts. When she came to me, I promptly answered, "I want to be a daddy."
I realize now that I totally upset the status quo with my response, but I have never been one to operate within the box known as normative. To my teacher's credit she did try to redirect me towards normalcy, in order to attempt spare me the terrible teasing of my peers that was sure to follow, by asking me if I didn't want to follow one of the heroic models, like my friends. I answered, "Yes, so I can be a dad."
Even at the age of five I had a clear sense of purpose: the most important thing in the world to me was to be a dad. Everything else served that purpose, a means to that end. It wasn't until several years later that purpose became defined as a desire to be the father of daughters.
Now, I should take a little space here and talk about a few factors that may have contributed to my point of view. I wasn’t your typical overly macho guy, trying to find his sexual identity, coming-of-age teenage boy. I wasn’t athletic. I didn’t date lots of girls. I wasn’t into cars, guns, or guitars. The closest that I came to being macho was being Air Force Jr. ROTC during my freshman year of high school.
I wasn't effeminate. I had lots of guy friends that I ran with and did typical guy things with. But, the majority of my closest, personal relationships were always with girls. I was the oldest son in a household of all boys, but I had little in common with my brothers. My whole life I remember desperately longing for a sister.
Like most men my generation I was rapidly approaching manhood not feeling in anyway that I had what it took to be successful as a man. I was terrified of how I would fail a son, but felt confident in my ability to connect with a daughter.
This by no means that I saw girls as my only chance at being a successful father, but it just may explain why I never even considered the idea of raising sons.
From the time I became old enough to begin imagining what my future family portrait might look like, it was always four girls. There was a wife in that picture, she was important, and she would definitely be very important to me before the four girls came into the picture. But, for now, I didn’t know her. Yet, in my heart, I already knew my four girls intimately and I was only sixteen.
There were lots of girls who were more than a casual part of my life. They spent time in my home and I in theirs. My parents knew them and theirs knew me. As a result of all of this exposure to their families I got the chance to observe their relationships with their fathers. I began to pay close attention and learn.
While most of my guy friends hung out at the mall purely to look at girls, and trust me I did my fair share of that as well, I also learned to become a student of human behavior as well. In other words, I became almost as much of a people watcher as I did girl watcher. I began to observe fathers and daughters engaging each other in public.
Both of these exercises became extremely enjoyable to me because I one day hoped to join their ranks. The desire of my heart to be the father of daughters was quickly beginning to set down deep, deep roots.
I began to notice that there was a natural and simple dynamic between father and daughter. One that was rewarding on so many levels it spoke of a gift that could only be divinely imparted. I also noticed that while God designed this relationship to be simple and rewarding, it could so easily be complex and completely draining.
I saw teenage daughters who walked five steps ahead of their fathers barely acknowledging his presence, of course, that is, until they wanted him to whip out his credit card and pay for their material desires. I also noticed the look of desperation in the eyes of those same fathers as they followed along hoping the next retrieval of the charge plate would gain them entrance back into their little princess’ heart.
At the other end of the spectrum, I saw middle-aged fathers who were doting over their grandkids at the mall play area while their adult daughter did some much needed, long put off shopping. At some point, either at the end or during the middle of the shopping trip, she walked up to him, beaming, sat on his lap, kissed him, and said, “I love you daddy.” She did this in front of all of the other moms and grandparents in the play area. This was a father who still beamed with pride when he caught sight of his daughter. They still had the special relationship God gives as a gift to every father and daughter at the very moment she is born.
I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a father of daughters. I knew which of those two types fathers I wanted to be. I was now on a mission.
Even dating took on a new purpose for me. I knew the kind of father I wanted to be to my daughters. I figured the best way to find a mentor to teach me to be that kind of father was to marry a girl who already had that very relationship with her own father. So, it was safe to say, if they didn’t have that special relationship with their father they probably didn’t have much of a chance of anything ever getting very serious.
Well, fortunately for me, the first part of my mission was easily accomplished. I was able to observe many father-daughter relationships up close and personal. I was even able to get some fathers to talk to me about their relationships with their daughters. I eventually fell in love with and married a girl who had a wonderful relationship with her daddy.
Now, there is an old cliché that goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” I understand that all to well. My life has been quite the example of that. One of those has been the master plan that I had in achieving my ideal family portrait.
Before my wife, Julie, and I got married we had agreed that we would wait five years before intentionally adding children to our family. Our purpose was ensuring that our marriage had a solid foundation before we began to build a family on it.
Eighteen months after we got married we left to go to college. This still fit well into our master plan. We would stop preventing pregnancy at the beginning of our senior year in college. We would get pregnant during the spring when we were student teaching. My wife would deliver our first daughter during the following summer. We would begin teaching in the fall and every twenty to thirty months we would have another daughter until we had four. Our family portrait would be full before my wife was thirty.
Unfortunately, plans and life rarely coincide. During my junior year in college I became very ill and was unable to finish school. We stopped all forms at the beginning of Julie’s senior year of college. Months went by and no positive signs of pregnancy.
I went to work managing a retail store and had to move six hours away from my wife during her last semester in college. It wasn’t easy or fun, but I had to pay the bills. Fortunately, she was able to arrange her student teaching in the same town where I was working. More time went buy and still no positive signs of a pregnancy.
Julie finished her student teaching and graduated from college. My job was not working out well. We soon decided to return to California to start over. Now, several years went by and still no sign of ever getting pregnant. In fact, we had medical verification that it was nearly, not quite virtually impossible that we would ever get pregnant without a miracle or medical intervention.
These were very hard years to live through. My whole life had become about three things: becoming the father of four little girls, building a home for children, and answering God’s calling on my life to full-time ministry. During these years I began to see all of those things evaporate.
Because of my sudden decline in health, with no apparent cause or treatment, I was forced to drop out of Bible College. While this did not completely remove all career paths for fulfilling my calling to service, it did greatly impede the road to finding opportunities. The health issues that continued to reveal themselves and increasingly become more problematic over the following years made life even more difficult. It took some time to adjust to living with some conditions that would never go away, learning to live with and manage pain that I may always live with, and working with a very patient doctor to find some treatments to help alleviate as many of the symptoms as possible. Life did eventually become livable again. But before it did, I honestly feared that I would be forced to give up my greatest desire in life of being a dad because I wouldn’t be able to give them anything of myself as a result of my declining health.
Then, if my health concerns weren’t enough to give me trepidation about whether it would be fair for a child to have me as a father, we received the official medical diagnosis of infertility, casting a cloud of doubt and anxiety over our hearts wondering if we would ever be able to have children anyway.
During this time, my father-in-law and I became very good friends and I was able to cherish the relationship he had with my wife that much more. We spent a lot of time with my in-laws during the first fifteen years of our marriage and I don’t remember a single night that we dinner with them or just spent an afternoon at their home that my wife didn’t at some point end up in her daddy’s lap in one of those cherished father-daughter moments.
My wife and I dealt with infertility for more than ten years before God brought our first child into our family, a son.
Just two months before our eleventh wedding anniversary God literally, and, I do mean literally, dropped a son into our family through adoption. It is a miracle story that is best suited for another place. By this time in my life, while I still dreamed of daughters, but by now my heart just ached for any child to hold as my own. I was grateful for a son, but I was no less terrified that I would screw up his life now than I was at sixteen years old.
Barely more than a month after our son’s first birthday my wife lost her father, our son lost his grandfather, whom he had become very attached to, and I lost my mentor. God had more than answered my prayers of youth for good in-laws. In my father-in-law I not only had a good example to follow in the father-daughter relationship role, but he had come to be one of my closest companions, as well. As much as it hurt for me to see the queen of my heart lose her daddy, I lost my second father too.
It has been nearly ten years since my father-in-law received his promotion orders to take his place as part of the host of heaven, but I have learned, in that time, that there are certain aspects of the father-daughter relationship whose flame is not cut short with the passing of the princess’s first love from this life to the next. His imprint on her, for good or for bad, will continue with her and impact everyone her life touches until her days on this earth are completed. It is an awesome responsibility to be the father of a daughter.
It would be another six years before God would relieve the sting of infertility in our marriage and my little princess was born. And, then two years after that our youngest, another boy, followed her.
Though she never said a word about it, I know that my father-in-law’s presence was greatly missed by my wife on each of the days when our two younger children were born. He was there when we brought our first child home from the hospital, his first day as a forever member of our family. And, through just a set of unplanned circumstances, he was the first member of any of our family to hold and embrace him that day. I know that she had always dreamed of her daddy coming into the delivery room and being able to hand over her children to him for the first time, for him to beam down on her with immense pride on his face and probably kiss her on the forehead before he even kissed her baby for the first time.
I still have not seen my lifelong dream of four little girls and God has blessed us with another little boy. My heart still longs for more children and, who knows, maybe someday that will still have the chance to become a reality. I may still have my four daughters. Only time will tell. The desire is still in my heart.
I do not love my boys any less than my little princess. I have learned that I have a lot to offer my sons, even if I am not Mister Machismo. I am raising two Prince Valliants who will one day sweep a young woman off her feet whose little princess will still be inside her looking for an adventurous live to take part in.
Along the road to fatherhood I spent many years as either a youth worker or as a youth pastor, so I had many opportunities to observe the relationships of fathers and daughters, up close and personal. Some I got to only observe from the periphery, like the people watching done in public places, and others I was invited into a more intimate observation by taking part in family events or counseling a troubled teen during those tough coming of age years.
I have had lots of opportunity to see the fruits of the time invested or neglected by fathers in their daughter’s lives. I was surprised to find out that only a rare few fathers had a clue as to how important even the simplest act between father and daughter can be to her whole life. The time spent or ignored, the words said or not said, the praise given or criticism delivered can have an impact that can not only affect her emotional well-being, but it can determine the types of friends that she chooses to associate with, the types of men that she prefers to be romantically involved with or marry, even the kind of mom she will eventually become.
It is an awesome responsibility to be the father of a daughter. I have come to believe, both through observation and personal life experience, that God blesses the father-daughter relationship with a unique anointing upon first sight of each other following birth (I know for me it began with the first prenatal glimpse of her heartbeat). This blessing makes the first several years of life the easiest in which to build and maintain that relationship.
If a father courts his daughter’s heart during the early years of her life, he will earn the right to maintain a close seat to her heart throughout the rest of her life. It also sets the standards by which all men that pass through her life will be judged. If daddy invested the time and love in her life in those important early years, other men will have to meet or exceed that standard if they want to gain entrance. If he didn’t, then she may go out looking for almost any other man to fill the void her father didn’t fill in those formative years.
I have witnessed that bear out as fact in too many lives. I have seen it set destructive patterns in the lives of young women barely even into their teen years. Too many fathers who then realize that they may have failed their daughters either bury their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong or sink into depression, becoming no good to themselves or anyone, let alone their daughters who still need them.
It is never too late, as long as both father and daughter are still living to build, repair, nurture, and grow the relationship that was meant to be, that both father and daughter at the core of their being need (even if they are too stubborn or hardhearted to admit it). Even an aged daughter who has made mess after mess of her life trying to replace what she never got from her father, still longs for daddy’s love, blessing, and unconditional acceptance.
My desire is to make sure that the investment is made in my little princess’ life and that I continue to nurture that relationship as long as I am living. Along the way if I can wake up a few other dads to the same responsibility facing them and possibility help a few other mend broken relationships, then the burden weighing on my heart will have been all that much more worth the carrying.
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