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Author Dr. K E Garland, Father-Daughter Relationships, US “tender age” shelters, US “zero tolerance” immigration policy
So much noise scrambling my thoughts as I read Daddy: Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships edited by Dr. K E Garland. On arrival at our southern border with Mexico, refugee children – referred to as illegal migrants – are separated from their parents. A two-year-old girl screams while a U.S. Border Patrol agent questions her mother. Where is her father, I wonder?
Back to my reading of Daddy.
In her account, “Abandoned at Breakfast,” BB – a writer, wife, and mother whose parents had divorced when she was a kid – recalls her emptiness when her father didn’t show up for her baby shower.
“Behind the makeup and flashing cameras, I was still the little girl who longed for her father’s embrace,” BB recalls. “I wanted [my father] to accept me and tell me that I was beautiful, even fifty pounds heavier.”
More distressing news disturbs my reflections on our troubled relationships with our fathers. The Department of Homeland Security is now holding an estimated 2,400 refugee children under the age of twelve in so-called “tender age” shelters.
If divorce can upend our lives as daughters, what happens when we are snatched from our parents in a strange land where people speak a different language?
My distress grows.
In “A Letter to My Father,” Varina Price – a public health professional and mother of four – writes: “I always wondered what it was like to be a ‘daddy’s girl.’ What would it be like to run to you and sit on your lap as you helped me to tie my shoe, tell me a story, or give me a hug?”
Varina’s father never responded to her letter.
The fourteen real-life stories shared in Dr. Garland’s book reveal the pain daughters endure because of absent, neglectful, or uncaring fathers. The negative impact hounds their adult lives: trust issues, especially with men; a broken life intent on revenge; emotional detachment; gnawing resentment towards father; fear of abandonment; and lingering anger. Each woman, in her own manner, finds a way to heal and move forward with her life.
Our president – father of three sons and two daughters – capitulates to criticisms of his “zero tolerance” in handling the influx of immigrants on our southern border.
“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he says, before signing an executive order to end the child abuse.
I think of the fathers holding government positions who conceive and implement such inhumane policies. I think of the daughters in their lives. What lessons are they teaching them about the ways of men?
As a daughter who also had a dysfunctional relationship with my father, I connected with the fourteen women in Dr. Garland’s collection. Like Roxanne – a wife, mother, and marriage & family counselor – in “Daddy’s Girl,” I learned to forgive my father.
“I knew that forgiveness has great power for the one choosing to forgive,” Roxanne writes.
I couldn’t agree more.
DR. K E GARLAND
Dr. K E Garland, born and raised in Chicago, now lives in Florida with her husband of twenty-one years and their two daughters. She is an award-winning writer whose work focuses on inspirational creative nonfiction.
The printed version of Daddy: Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships (2018) is available at Lulu. The Kindle eBook is available at Amazon.
Other publications include: The Unhappy Wife (2016) and Kwoted (2015).
Three Worlds One Vision 
My father abused me on many levels as a child and yet for years I yearned for his approval. Parental power should never be underestimated. I wonder when we Americans are going to be fed up enough to stand up to the current man stealing the course of our American policy.
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Bernadette, I’m sorry to learn that you, too, had an abusive father.
People are standing up but it usually doesn’t make the news, as occurred recently with the restaurant incidents involving the DHS Secretary and WH Press Secretary.
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Reblogged this on Guyanese Online.
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Thanks for sharing, Cyril. Have a great week 🙂
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Pingback: Daddy: Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships Edited by Dr. K E Garland
Thanks for sharing, GuyFrog 🙂
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My father was an abusive alcoholic, emotionally volatile, financially unstable, and a few other unpleasant things. However, he did love his children.
My mother was cold, detached, extremely materialistic, and bitterly resentful towards her marriage and family. If she loved her children, she did so in ways none of us could recognize. However, she was a good provider.
Obviously, this wasn’t a happy arrangement for anyone. I sympathize with all the daughters and sons who unfortunately have or had dysfunctional relationships with their parents. I suspect our numbers are quite large.
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Thanks for sharing, Robert. Sounds a lot like my dysfunctional family. Parenting is no easy task. Though we try to be better parents than our own, we still carry all the heavy baggage of our own childhood.
You mention that your mother was cold and detached. I wonder what kind of relationship she had with her father.
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She was the youngest of a large Catholic family in Sicily, and felt intense resentment/jealousy towards her mother and sisters whom she felt had short-changed her on material things. She always thought highly of her father and brothers, but they were gone much of the time trying to keep the family financially secure.
Her marriage to my father – who was born in the U.S. to an immigrant family from a nearby town in Sicily – was arranged. Although she relished the idea of coming to America, she despised being forced into it and held onto that hostility for the rest of her life.
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Our life stories are never clean and simple. Arranged marriages can cause hostility, as happened with your mother. My mother, too, was forced into an unwanted marriage. My father suffered the consequences and released his rage on me and my siblings.
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We’ve had similar family experiences, Ros. I like to believe that the pain made me a stronger person. I hope that is true, anyway.
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People in power have become so poisoned by it that they neither think or function compassionately, it’s not even a consideration. They see it as a weakness rather than a tremendous strength which is why they may achieve “Bigness” but never “Greatness.” On the subject of father abuse my God it will never end and the effects will travel into the millenniums. I consider myself fortunate that my parents abandoned me at two and I quickly discovered many adults were’nt to be taken seriously.
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Thanks for sharing, Mike. Amazing how we-humans are all connected in our painful childhood experiences. Abandoned at two… I suffered abandonment in adulthood. Far too many adults in our administration cannot be taken seriously. They care only about themselves.
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There are accounts is SS fathers who are said to have been devoted to their families during the Third Reich. Unfortunately, such consideration for other human lives stopped at the door. The rationalized compartments within the human psyche can do their work too well. One can only oppose such “work.”
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Thanks for this insight, Dr. Stein. We can rationalize our brutality when we deem our victims as less than human.
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Rosaliene, you’ve made a brilliant connection between the loss of a father and our current loss of government-supported breaking up of families. Both of which result in the same types of issues (abandonment, trust, anger, etc.). Thank you again for reading and writing this. I’m also glad you empathize and sympathize with these relationship challenges.
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Thank you, too, Kathy, for raising this issue through your book.
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Rosaliene,
It astounds me how widespread and deeply entrenched institutionalized cruelty is. Are these damaged and damaging fathers the result of the institutions we take for granted?
You mention you were abused by a priest. I have to wonder about the Catholic proscription against priests marrying. It seems to create a particularly vile imbalance between the sexes.
Along those lines, I’m currently reading “The Power of Myth,” the book version of a PBS series of conversations between professor and “mythologist” Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. Campbell states that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic myth of creation, of “The Fall” in Genesis, is the only tradition in which the serpent and woman are demonized. In other traditions, the serpent is a holy figure, representing wisdom and transformation, and women exalted because of her power to give life.
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Katharine, our institutions are indeed failing us.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say that I was abused by a priest. The real-life stories of father-daughter relationships shared in Dr. Garland’s book are about our biological fathers, not priests. My father was verbally and physically abusive, but not a sexual abuser.
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Rosaliene,
I went back and re-read your article and comments and didn’t find any reference to abuse by a priest. I thought I had read that by you or a commentator. Sorry for my confusion. Thanks for the correction.
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No problem, Katharine 🙂
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For what it’s worth, the “snake” gets a reprieve just once in the Bible, in the book of Numbers:
Nu. 21:8 The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a
pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.”
Nu. 21:9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then
when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze
snake, he lived.
I guess that was the invention of the Caduceus…? Makes me wonder what “God” needed the image of the snake to heal “his” people.
The question that needs asking is, What or Who established the Patriarchy on earth and why did it have to be violently misogynistic? If we dare look for the source of the problem then we will have something by which to solve it. If we dare not, for fear of upsetting the status quo, then the problem will remain, no matter what political correctness is applied to make the problem appear less destructive than it actually is.
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Sha’Tara,
Here’s maybe a partial answer, from “The Power of Myth,” by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. It’s based on a PBS documentary of a conversation between the two in 1985-1986.
Campbell, a professor and mythologist, says that:
“The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something over and above a fallen nature.”
And,
“You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity . . .”
Campbell claimed when the Hebrews went into Canaan, which worshiped a mother-goddess, they purposely stamped out this pagan tradition that conflicted with their version of man’s having “fallen” due to the temptations of woman and serpent.
I’m re-reading the book now and plan to write a blog on it soon.
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Katharine, what a different civilization it would’ve been with God as Mother! I look forward to reading your blog post on “The Power of Myth.”
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Rosaliene,
I’m looking forward to writing it. The mother-goddess approach respects the earth and doesn’t violate it. Currently, I see women leading the way towards more eco-friendly paradigms.
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Without reading the book, I’m assuming BB wasn’t sexually or physically abused by her father. Many American girls (and some boys) aren’t so lucky. She doesn’t know how lucky she was.
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BB wasn’t sexually abused by her father. At a young age, she got pregnant for her boyfriend.
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With the devastating impact on children and parents, it’s almost an aside — but I, too, wonder about the harm done to U.S. government employees who must implement such dehumanizing policies. It is also degrading to them, desensitizing, damaging. I wish they’d walk out. Of course, workers need their jobs, and some may fear their own replacement might be harder on the kids.
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JoAnn, that’s why collective action is crucial, usually made possible through workers’ unions.
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What Joseph Campbell said is true, problem is he never explained the cause of the anti goddess civilization’s rise, or why there came the violent switch. I was fortunate to have teachers who knew that history and explained it, based on their cosmology. So far no other explanation has come close to satisfying the requirements in the question. If we want to know, the information is available to all intelligent sincere questers but it demands a mental paradigm shift. I’ll be interested in your take on it.
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a beautifully supportive piece
for parents & children
in these most
difficult times.
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Thanks, David 🙂
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