Approval

Why do we seek approval from other people?  What drives us to care what they think?  For most of my life I've been driven to do things simply because it's what everyone else did.

I recently went shopping for clothes.  If you know me, in the last 5 years, I have begun a hate-relationship with shopping.  In my younger years, I'd go shopping just because.  Now, it's maybe an every two year ordeal.  N was asking me what I liked.  In all honesty, I didn't know.  Mainly because I don't care so much about looking a certain way or being accepted anymore. 

Approval is tricky business. 

For most of my life my birth father was not around.  When I was 10 I reached out to him.  I wanted to know him and to have a dad.  For the next 5 years I'd get one phone call or one letter a year from him.  For that brief moment, I felt like I was accepted and loved by him.  I would dream about having a relationship with him, meeting my half-brother and doing things that dads and daughters do together.

When I was 15 I got a phone call that shattered that dream.  He acknowledged that my birth wasn't important to him.  He acknowledged that all the correspondence was because his mother prompted him to do it, not because he cared to know me.  In an instant everything shattered.  If the one man on this earth who was supposed to love me and he didn't, how would anyone else love me?  Especially a man. 

For the next decade I struggled with this.  Struggled to see myself as loveable.  Struggled to love myself.  It was that defining moment in my life where my past is categorized as before that phone call and after that phone call.

If I'm honest, this wound has never fully healed.  There are days where I'm still 15, on the phone with him and feel those same emotions.  I suspect this is something I will feel the rest of my life to some degree.

What it does for me now is something my 15-year old self would've never known that heartbreak would do.  It has shaped me as a parent.  I know the power I have as a parent, whether biological or step.  I know the impact that the love and acceptance of a parent can do to a child.  I learned that being a parent isn't about the grand gestures.  It's about the evening, in pajamas, playing school for the 1,500th time that day.  It's about searching for 20 minutes before bed for that certain stuffed animal that will make the sleep better.  It's the time when we paint our nails together.  It's the phone call or text just to see how they are.  It's the random "I love you."  It's the million little things that will fade with time, but that have an impact that will endure. 

The world teaches us that there is a certain way to be, to dress, to act.  It's hard enough to fit into that mold because it's ever-changing.  My heart's desire is for our girls to know that they are loved, desired and accepted just as they are. 

My approval of them is unconditional.