Arise and Come Away With Me…

My dad and I are super close. He’s not perfect but we are best friends and talk quite a bit on the phone. I am the epitomy of a “daddy’s girl”. It just goes to show, that if you don’t grow up in a dysfuntional home, gender roles don’t get confused easily. I’ve always been a super girly girl. My dad was laughing tonight about how even though I had two brothers and a dad that were obsessed with ESPN, I had absolutely no interest in sports (other than gymnastics and figure skating). When I was little I would traipse around in this faux fur coat and muff my grandmother made me. I was always dancing around the house and doing cartwheels in the grocery store. I was always baking something. I would sometimes practice my uneven bars routine on the back of the couch. My girlfriends and I would play the “shopping game” in which we would price everything in my bedroom, take some old wal-mart bags and one of us would play the cashier while the the other one would go on a shopping spree.

My brothers on the other hand would talk incessantly about sports. In fact, I’m pretty sure they had the stats of every pro ball player in existence. While I was listening to Amy Grant and Leslie Philips as a kid, my brothers were listening to Christian metal like Vengeance Rising and Deliverance and had a subscription to “Heaven’s Metal” (now HM Magazine).

We had fun as a family though. We took camping trips quite consistently, considering my parents were old hippies and couldn’t seem to get away from nature. My brothers would go fishing and my mom and I would stay back and read and journal. We even had the iconoclastic game night or movie night every week, even when we were teenagers.

As I became an adult and went away for awhile, I became pretty detached from the rest of my family. I didn’t realize that things were slowly unraveling. During FITN… my first week to be exact, my mom served my dad divorce papers. My parents had been in ministry together for over 25 years… married for 32.

In April, my dad is getting re-married. It is a bittersweet situation. I don’t know if I’m just being too idealistic but I want my family back. This is very final and all I can feel to do is distance my heart and press through this the best way I can while feeling as little pain as possible. All of those fun things will never happen again… not with all of us together, anyway. It’s over. My childhood is long over and even this part of my childhood is completely changed.