Dear Dad,
Even using that word brings up images of pain, lonely nights and years of questioning why I wasn’t enough for you.Always feeling bad when I see some men talking about their children,how they are the best thing that has ever happened to them.Whenever my friends are discussing about their father, I always throw my face to the other side with tears rolling down from my eyes.While I am working to forgive you the question remains: How on earth could you abandon me?
I needed you to help balance out my female-dominated life, be there to give me the talk about boys so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through my current state of bad relationships and empty voids. You were supposed to be the first man to tell me that I’m beautiful and help me to know myself before anyone had the opportunity to label me. I was supposed to be your “little girl”.
I needed you and you didn’t care. How does one sleep at night not knowing if their own flesh and blood is breathing, eating, safe and secure? I’m not sure if your lack of presence was a blessing or a curse. My pain runs deep just like it does for my other sisters and brother you’ve managed to abandon as well. You were the first man to break my heart and I’m struggling to not hate you.
A man that puts himself last does not abandon his family. What would you have lost by being in my life? Your minimal contribution is an insult to who you could have been to me.
I’m sorry that you missed out on something and someone so great. But I guarantee that I won’t let your actions break me. I pray for my husband to be the father to my children I never had. That my daughters know the comfort of their father’s arms, his voice, his love, his care.
One day I’ll walk down the isle without you again by my side. But then again I’m used to it. Thank you for causing my mom so much pains *tears* Thank you for the pain, because without it I wouldn’t know healing, I wouldn’t know love, I wouldn’t know God.
Grassroots advocates, public interest attorneys, and legal scholars gathered in October 2011 at the University of Baltimore for the debut symposium of "The Matthew Fogg Symposia On The Vitality of Stare Decisis In America." Convening such a broad and in many ways diverse audience, requires the program series to be worthwhile academically, yet have populist appeal. Towards that end, the event website explains: "It is both scholarly and practical to examine the current vitality of stare decisis as a legal doctrine in America."
