Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.
~Joseph Joubert
Today is Father’s Day and kids of all ages will think of their dads and of the many ways he influenced their lives.
As I look at my father, I feel that he missed the mark of being a dad and in doing so made our lives that much more difficult to navigate.
We are taught by what we see in our home and from the way we are treated.
We learn to love from how we are loved.
We learn respect from how we are respected.
We learn about our self by how others treat us.
We learn how to feel about ourselves by the way others feel about us.
We are simply taught by the actions others give us. And in my childhood home we were given a backwards kind of love, one that mixed love with fear.
Love and fear do not go together, ever.
They are not the ingredients to make a child grow.
I am so grateful that my children do not fear their dad.
My mother said at one time that what she wanted most was for her kids to have a dad; she didn’t want to deprive us of that.
Yet the man she hung on to was not dad material.
You can have a man in the home, but only his actions can make him a dad.
My husband has surpassed my wildest dreams of being a dad. He has spent endless hours engaged with our kids on all levels.
He acts like a dad.
