Denna Babul RN - The Fatherless Daughter Project: Understanding Our Losses and Reclaiming Our Lives

This book is so meaningful to us. We believe this book can be so meaningful for you. We have been where you have been. We want to help you to better understand the impact the loss of your father had on your life and how you can heal from that loss. We have, through personal experience and exploration of this issue, become passionate about sharing our knowledge and helping women better understand why they may be acting and feeling the way that they dobecause they are fatherless.

As we were preparing the material for this book, we knew that we needed something living alongside it to help women further see themselves through the stories of others. We are creating a thirty-minute documentary, The Fatherless Daughter Project, that contains intimate and compelling interviews with a diverse group of fatherless daughters to showcase their resilience and how theyve created success in their lives.

Beyond the documentary, we wanted to write this book to share our stories, the stories of women who have lost their fathers, and most important, successful strategies for coping, surviving, and thriving despite the loss. Each womans story is unique to her own circumstances, but fatherless daughters also share some commonalities.

Karins losses were the consequences of divorce, adoption, and dysfunction; Dennas losses were because of divorce and death.

While writing this book, Denna and I spent countless hours talking about our own journeys. Because we were both willing to search our own lives, amazing, life-changing moments have come along the way. It was during our first major rewrite that I realized I needed to have a conversation with my fathermy natural father. He was not the dad who raised me, but he was the father who created me and had now become increasingly present in my life. As the years passed, we got together more regularly, and he has become a wonderful grandpa to my three children. Although my children got their grandpa, I still felt a void. We had never talked about what all of those years of his absence did to my life, and I continued to struggle with it.

On a sunny June morning Dad was paying us his regular Friday visit. He knew I was writing a book on fatherlessness, but we had not spoken about it at length. We had talked about a lot of things; we just never talked about us. I think I had avoided the sensitive topic because I knew the conversation would be difficult.

There were several reasons for his absence during my childhood, including his giving me up for adoption to my new father. His and my mothers stories about the past were different, which left me confused. Without understanding the story, I had felt abandoned by him most of my life. Being disconnected from my adopted father twenty years later added stinging salt to the wound. Still, I didnt want my truth to run my birth father off and leave me abandoned again. Although I was waiting for the ideal moment for The Conversation, I did not know that it was going to happen that morning.

He caught me off guard when the children left the room to play. As the room quieted, he walked slowly around the breakfast table, putting his hand atop the curve of one of the chairs. He said something I could tell he had been waiting to say: Karin, I was looking at your fatherless daughters research study online. He smirked and shook his head, pausing, his eyes fixed on the white tablecloth. Heart pounding, I stopped still at the kitchen counter and waited. The Conversation was happening.

Do you think you are fatherless? I mean, I am your father, and I am right here. We stood still for a moment as the challenge hung in the air between us, him looking at me, and me looking everywhere for a safety net. Oh my God, what do I say? Im not ready.... I cant do this.... Im scared of the words I want to use. My hearts thumping was making me feel faint, so I took a deep breath. I had to overcome my decades-old insecurity to speak as I scrambled to find honesty and my first sentence. Silently, I told myself, You have what it takes, Karin. You need to just say it. I had to push through this scary place to get rid of the fears that had resided in me for too long. I steadied myself and looked him in the eye.

Dad, let me start by saying I am so glad that you are here now. I dont want to lose this. I am so grateful that you are in our lives and that my kids are getting their grandpa. I paused, reaching deep inside for a new boldness to continue. But, Dad, I did lose my father when I was a little girl. You did give me up for adoption. You let another man raise me, and he and I are now estranged too. You dont know what I went through. I lost a close connection with you for a long time. There is so much to the story that we have never talked about. Things were bad, and I was in a lot of pain for a lot of years. I took a break, as I could feel he wanted to interject.