To Own A Dragon

Wow, it's been more than a week since the last blog entry. I guess I just haven't really had anything to say, which happens sometimes I guess.

Anyway, I would like to get back to The Present Future soon, but I also started reading another book. It's entitled To Own A Dragon, and it's by Donald Miller, the same guy who wrote Blue Like Jazz, Searching For God Knows What and Through Painted Deserts. All three of those books are included in my favorites, they all mean something to me in different ways, and I honestly believe that I read each one of them at the exact time in my life and journey that I needed to read them. And To Own A Dragon is no different.

Sometimes I wonder if Miller and I were Siamese twins at birth, and our mother sent him off to Texas to live with someone and kept me. There are times as I'm reading his books where I wonder if I wrote the same sentence I just read from Miller's book before he did, and somehow he found a way to plagiarize me. It's eerie sometimes.

Anyway, this book is basically about Miller growing up without a father. In this way, we are somewhat different. Miller's father left when he was young. I had three dads. My real father left our family when I was five and my brother was one. Then, my mother remarried, had another son and divorced a few years later when I was nine, my one brother was five and my little brother was one. Then she remarried again to someone who already had two kids, so we were a house of seven for awhile, until both my stepsister and stepbrother ran away to go live with their mom in California. Then my mother died of cancer and my second stepdad remarried and basically kicked all of us out of his life. Having three fathers created some strange situations for me and my brothers - at my grandfather's funeral, I remember at one point all three fathers were talking to me at the same time, and I remember thinking that that moment was perhaps the strangest moment I've ever been in.

I don't have a relationship with any of my fathers. I'm very close to my grandmother on my real dad's side, but I've only really talked to him a handful of times since I was five. My first stepdad lives in Colorado and my youngest brother has a relationship with him, but that's about it. And my second stepdad - I have no idea where he's at. The last time I had any communication from him, I sent him an e-mail telling him I had a daughter, as well as a couple of other things involving my brothers, and he wrote back and yelled at me for bringing up those other things when it wasn't my business. I did write an e-mail to him a few months ago telling him I forgave him for the things that happened, but never heard back.

As I was reading through Miller's book (I'm almost done with it now), I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. His main point, I believe, was that not having a father meant that he had to learn what it meant to be a man on his own. And that has affected everything that has happened in his life - his actions, his thought processes, his world-view, his view of God, his view of women, his view of sex - everything. I realize now that I had to learn everything on my own as well. My stepdad, when I was a teenager, never talked to me about how a girl should be treated. My parents were marginal churchgoers, so everything I grew up knowing about God, I learned on my own. Rather than having someone there to let me know how to step around the land mines of life, I instead had to step on those land mines and find ways to put my pieces back together and avoid the same kind of land mine.

Today, in our worship services, we had a pretty neat time where we wrote our hurts on broken pieces of pottery and gave them up to God. I wonder how many of those pieces of pottery had a hurt on them that was directly related to fathers. I was doing a special music at the time, so I did not put one in, but I know what I would have written down on my piece of broken pottery. I would have written about the time when I finally realized that my second stepdad was pushing me and my brothers away from him so that he could have a new life with his new wife. I realized this when I discovered I had a brain tumor (I was 23 years old). At the time, the doctors didn't know what it was, if it was benign or malignant, if it could be removed by surgery or if I needed radiationi or chemotherapy. All they told me was that I was going in for surgery in three days. I had three days to tell people I needed to tell, and basically get my life in order because there was a good chance that I would die. I called my stepdad up to tell him, and I asked him if there was any way for him to come out, because I needed him to be there. He told me no, he told me good luck, and that he would be thinking good thoughts about me (he turned his back on God by this time completely). I was crushed. I was rejected.

I can see how that situation along with all the other situations with my fathers have made me who I am. I can see how my personality and how I see things in life are directly related to this reality. I want more than anything else in this world and in this life to be the father that I never had to my daughter. I want her to grow up knowing her daddy loves her and would do anything for her. I want her to know that I will always be there for her.

Thank You, God, for bringing me through all of the pain in my life - I have held on to you like a drowning person would hold onto a life preserver. Although there have been times when I haven't trusted You, I know that You are the only reason I can continue to live this life with some hope and peace. May you reveal in me the parts of my life that have been affected in a negative way by growing up fatherless, may you heal those parts of me, and cause me to overcome them by Your strength. Amen.