My Father-Daughter Relationship

It seems many people who struggle to connect with their parents as flawed humans as opposed to authority figures eventually find a natural connector when they have kids. Seeing their parents interact with their grandchildren gives the relationship a new dimension.

That wasn’t my path. Frankly, I don’t completely understand people who take that path, but I spent a lot of time in my early adulthood wondering why they didn’t understand me.

I’m a person who derives great satisfaction, fulfillment even, from connecting with all kinds of people one on one. I always wanted to connect with my father that way.

Ultimately it was therapy that helped me have a relationship with him. I explored what that would uniquely mean for us, with our very different lenses on the world. What might, or can, that relationship look like? After years of feeling “not understood” because my life’s desires weren’t conventional for an Italian-American female in our family, I yearned for my father to “get” me.

To that end, I am ever grateful that I opened my mind to therapy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With that work, I started to see my father as a person, not just a parent whose approval I desperately wanted. I embraced the concept in the Prayer of St. Francis, which inspired me to augment that feeling of wanting to be understood: