Finding Our Fathers

We never considered how hard it was for our fathers to go to work every day, toiling away at a job they didn’t like. And even worse, seemingly having no other choices because their families were depending on them for their very existence. Growing up, our fathers did not have time for family; spending time with us was something remote from their daily life, making them a stranger in each of their perspective homes. Worse still, We were too young to understand why our fathers were not present. This essay reveals how we have attempted to make sense of the experience this distance between us and our fathers has caused in order to detoxify our individual images of our fathers. Detoxifying the image of father means recognizing that our fathers’ have been wounded as well.