My Life on the Father's Day D-List

This month, the day after Father's Day 2010, my estranged daughter will celebrate her 23^rd birthday with me nowhere near the epicenter of her young adult life. As biological fathers go I'm as impotent and insignificant as the next aftershock. I'm off the map and out of range from the vibrations of any father-daughter activity. Despite the sad seismic forces majeures of our lives, my daughter's age of 23 is significant because I was the exact same age when I met her mother.

That's probably a strange age for any father in his 50s to ponder. The same age as when I met her mother. It's hard to believe I actually fell in love with the mother of my daughter nearly 28 years ago, after moving to Arcata, California to finish my bachelor's degree in journalism at Humboldt State University. Life is like that. Life drifts by in dreamy revolutions, flowing and fading in ripples of thought and slipstreams of memory along an ever-changing time space continuum. But that's another story.

My daughter and I haven't spoken in four-and-a-half long years. We haven't seen each other since 1999, the year her mother moved from San Diego to Denver, Colorado. That's a long time no see situation in any forgotten father's playbook.

As my daughter nears this 23^rd milestone in our lives, my own thoughts and memories of our time together are fading fast. I want to embrace the pieces of our diminishing and disintegrating past like a man crippled in the prime of his life by a freak accident. I want to rewind the damaged register of our lives as fast as I can. Sadly, as my sole daughter turns the magic age of 23, be kind, rewind is perhaps the only hope left in our estranged father-daughter relationship.

To gain a deeper sense of my situation, I searched the internet with how to mend father daughter relationships. It seems I'm not the only D-List dad on the block. It looks like a lot of fathers get the blues on the one day set aside for dads and daughters to celebrate the love they share and to applaud him for a job well done. Like me, plenty of fathers are looking for ways to fix their broken relationships with the little girls they never got to know.

The psychology of adult relationships is vast and deep territory. A man could spend months and even years reading up on how to fix the damage already done, the disconnects along the fractured and often severed lines of communication between himself and his long gone daughter. Learning how to restart and rebuild any sort of bond with my daughter, much less to repair our lost feelings of mutual love and understanding, is a tall order because we never shared those kinds of connections in the first place. So the question is how do we start from scratch and become close friends when we were never close to begin with?

Sounds like an order that may never get filled, right? But then I remember two of my favorite quotes from the Father's Day Blues handbook. Phrases like never give up and it's never too late give me hope and strength and lift my spirits. I must continue repeating the first crucial step of reconciliation, to keep reminding my daughter again and again that I'm still here, still around, still alive and kicking and waiting for the day when she takes one small, forgiving step in my direction too.

My daughter might not know it, but no matter how far I slip from the ganglions of her mind, I take comfort in knowing, or at least believing, that I'll always be a part of her life. I'll never give up or stop trying to become one of the focal points of her existence. At times I feel discouraged and disappointed at how far I've fallen from her view. I try not to stay in those angry and bitter places of the human heart for too long.

I once got so frustrated and annoyed with my daughter I told her in an email to grow up and stop blaming me for what happened in our relationship. That approach has always backfired. No amount of blaming or preaching has ever done our estranged relationship a bit of good. In fact, every time I retreat behind the protective armor of my own pain and pity I always feel lonelier than ever for my daughter. Like a wounded animal caught in a deadly offspring trap, I'm compelled to remove my hurt pride as though it were a grisly, twisted part of myself I must chew off and discard for my very survival.

Like her biological father nearly 27 years ago, my daughter graduated from university this past May. I sent her a Nook and she sent me an email thanking me for it. This week, for her 23^rd birthday, I sent her a leather Nook cover to go along with her graduation gift. No word back yet. I hope she sends another thank you note, but it's okay either way. She's 23 years old and I'm a million miles away from the epicenter of her life. All I can do is to keep making fatherly footprints in her direction.