Father’s Garden
“When I was a little girl, I had a pocket full of dreams
Only to see them scattered on the floor
The day that you left me there, waiting by the front door.”
That’s how I start my newest single, “Father’s Garden.” The story behind this song is one that is hard to share, but I want to help folks who have faced a similar struggle.
When I was about a year old, my parents divorced. A few years later, my mother moved away from Yuba City in the Central Valley of California, where she had lived with my father, to Petaluma, California. Per my parents’ custody arrangement, every weekend my father would pick me up in Petaluma and drive to Yuba City. The drive was about two hours each way. My dad and I always made the best of the drive, listening to classical music while making up stories about the different sounds we heard, often involving a cat chasing a mouse.
During this time, my parents' ongoing custody battles intensified. I distinctly remember the police being called numerous times because one of my parents either had a disagreement with the other, or I wasn’t returned to a parent at the appropriate time. I felt like a pawn in a chess match.
I don’t remember the exact date but one Friday night when I was five years old, I was waiting for my dad to pick me up from my mom’s house. I waited, waited, and waited. He never showed up. After this happened, I would occasionally get birthday and Christmas cards, and a random gift here and there but never heard his voice or saw him again. I never understood why he left and had a head full of questions.
When I turned 12, I initiated contact with one of my relatives that led to a meeting with my father. We reestablished a relationship from ages 12 to 14. He learned about my love of photography and bought me my first manual camera, something that I loved and cherished. We had amazing times out on the property that he lived on; it was 14 acres on the California coast. It was beautiful and a place where I could fully express myself in nature, similar to my new house in Tennessee. I wanted to ask my dad why he left, and one day I mustered up all of the courage that I had and posed the question, “Why did you leave?” The response that I got was sharp: “Never ask that again.” At that point, I just accepted what had happened and that was that. However, in my heart and unconsciously I felt like it was my fault and that somehow I had pushed my dad away; I made him leave. This came full circle again when on one day in November 1995, he left again. Again, I got a few cards and gifts, and then nothing for years.
I had an inkling that my family knew where my dad was but understood that they had to jockey between two people who they loved very much to keep the peace. It’s not a fun position by any means.
During the time that my father was absent in my life, I lived in England (something that he had always wanted for me), graduated high school, went to college, got married, started a company, got divorced, tried to hold my cookies together, came to Jesus, worked in diversity and inclusion in tech, participated in several outreach excursions, traveled the world, saw endless concerts, art, and museums—the list goes on and on and on. Most of these activities were things that my father would have loved to participate in. As my fiancé says, I’m very much my father’s daughter: We are very alike in interests, thinking, the way we express ourselves, and how we enjoy life. We also share the trait of being able to exit a situation either physically, mentally, or emotionally. I suppose on my end it’s something that’s been learned.
When my father left again, I was heartbroken, confused, angry, and just plain disgusted. How could I have trusted him again only to be let down? Often the expression that would ring in my head was, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” I felt like a fool. I remember some poetry that I wrote at that time for my high school English class. It was dark and full of rage. I was angry, very, very angry. The anger spilled into anxiety, and that anxiety spilled into codependency.
I searched for the love that I could not find in my dad in other men. I had many attempts and false starts at relationships because I looked for something that they could not offer me. I had one-night stands and would chase in truly unhealthy ways. With my first marriage, I pulled away emotionally but felt compelled to stay in our marriage because I didn’t know how to function without that love. I couldn’t see it at the time, but through the help of a lot of therapy, I quickly recognized that I was codependent.
One important part of this story is that in 2013, I became a Christian. That changed my trajectory in life, how I love, how I find love, how I am loved. And most importantly, how I love others.
After 20 years, I finally saw my dad again. I was at a family gathering, and I went into my aunt’s kitchen and saw a man I didn’t recognize. He said something to me that I couldn’t quite make out and then it hit me, this man was my dad. He aged a lot—I mean we all had—but to the point where I could barely recognize him. I suppose much of this was my brain trying to block out the trauma from his absence. No longer seeing his face meant that I didn’t have to endure the pain that I was subjected to. When he tried to talk to me again, I had great disdain and wanted nothing to do with him outside of harming him, and decided to not engage. He said one last thing to me before we parted ways, “Let me know when you want to go to dinner and we can talk.” The first thing that ran through my mind was, “No way! I never want to sit down with you and talk or have anything to do with you. Absolutely nothing.” In fact, I warned my family to never have us in the same space again. If he were to be at family functions, I was not to be there. I didn’t want to see him and wanted nothing to do with him in any way, shape, or form.
Flash forward two years and I am now 36. Age, reflection, repentance, and faith have their ways of maturing— and humbling—you. I wanted to forgive my dad and let this go. I call that year the year of the Forgiveness Train. I forgave a lot of folks that year and figured that if you are going to forgive, you might as well start with the one that you’ve been putting off the most. I politely asked my aunt to arrange a meeting between my dad and me. I think she was somewhat shocked and wanted to make sure that I was going to be okay. I assured her it would be fine. And after 22 years of being apart, my dad and I had dinner together. The first conversation was a little clunky, understandably. That one dinner led to another dinner, that other dinner led to phone conversations, and those phone conversations led to what I would like to call, “Father’s Garden.”
You see, I had this dilapidated piece of dirt in the backyard of my house in San Jose. I accepted that I would be living in this house for the foreseeable future and wanted to do something special with it. I asked my dad if he could come by to take a look at it and give me some suggestions for building a patio. Well, those patio questions turned into a major overhaul of the garden! Looking back, there was no better moment for my faith to come into my life than this one. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that my dad and I would be tending to a piece of dirt like we were doing when I was little while living on a farm in the Central Valley. Life certainly comes full circle and forgiveness allows for these miracles to happen. So there we were, about to embark on creating a new patio, which led to tearing up the existing concrete, putting in a retaining wall, planting all types of flowers, bushes, shrubs, native California plants, and trees. It’s sometimes hard for me to believe how it all transpired.
We started our yard project in May and disaster struck in November. Two days after Thanksgiving, I was riding my new shiny red bike, when I took a spill that put me in the hospital with two shattered bones in my arm. I was in bad shape, to say the least. Nobody was able to come and be with me at the hospital except God...and you guessed it, my dad. He was the only one available, the only one with the means and the time. He stayed with me for weeks to help nurse me back to health. In a sense, the accident had reduced me to an infantile state and I often look back at those times and think that God had positioned my dad to care for me in a way that he never could when I was little. He literally had to bathe me, change me, and feed me. The bond between us grew in ways that I could never have imagined during that season.
A few months after my accident, I was called by God to head to Nashville. When my dad and I started our “Father’s Garden,” I thought I would stay in my San Jose home for many years to come and enjoy the beautiful space we were building but my time there came to an end in September 2019. My dad and I worked relentlessly to finish our garden, often working several days in a row and weekends to get it done. And we did. Right before I left for Nashville, we dug the hole for the last plant and put the final pieces of patio brick in. It was a job well done, as Christ would say.
I’m grateful for the time that my dad and I had together. I’m so thankful that God gave us that barren piece of land to work back into a fully functioning and beautiful garden. It’s crazy that something so dead can come back to life when you allow yourself to let go of the past and look forward to the future and possibilities.
And I’m sure you are wondering if I ever did ask my dad again why he left. Well, of course, I did :) And the response that he gave me was one that I was never quite satisfied with. But I had to make the decision and let it go. In fact, my dad gave me a shirt for my birthday with a picture of the Buddha that says, “Let that Shit Go.” It’s something that I cherish.
For anyone who is struggling with starting over, forgiving, making something out of nothing, this song and story are for you. I understand, I get it. I also have seen the impossible. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that my father would be one of my favorite people and that we would have such a loving and kind relationship; we just get each other. But to get to that place, I had to forgive and forgive hard. It is possible, that I assure you. On that note, go build something beautiful with someone you love today - you never know where it may take you 💙