Opening Thoughts

I wrote this nearly a month ago. It was exactly what was going through my mind as we began this process:

September 21, 2011

It’s been a few days now, since Holly took her first pregnancy test. Today is Wednesday and is the first time since Sunday when I’ve felt “normal.” We’ve been at it for a few days now, trying to process this information and I feel like I’m finally able to not be completely overwhelmed with the knowledge that I have a very important job coming up.

As of today, we haven’t told anyone. We have a doctor’s appointment on Friday morning and we’re going to tell our parents on Friday evening at dinner. That was an adventure in itself, trying to convince them all to go to dinner without saying, “You’re going to want to be at this dinner.”

But the simple reality is this… I’m convinced that both nature and nurture are working against me in the fatherhood department. You see, my dad has been largely absent throughout my entire life. In fact, the only time I’ve seen him or even spoken to him in the past three years has been at my wedding; and to be completely honest, I was reluctant to invite him to that. To say that our relationship is tenuous would probably be a vast understatement. There really is no relationship. Even during the periods of my life when he wasn’t absent, the relationship was minimal, at best. We share no common interests, we share nothing at all in common, except for being red heads and genetically linked.

In all honesty, this is a travesty. It’s a travesty that represents my entire life and my entire outlook on being a husband and a father. But it’s deeper than that, his father’s relationship with him wasn’t any better. There was really nothing there. Although, I can only speak from the perspective of someone who has heard about their relationship from other people, because my father and I have never spoken about it (nor will we ever speak about it, I’m sure).

Surely there’s a genetic link here, right? It just feels like it’s DNA for Connell men to be bad fathers. But there’s a nurture element too, the simple fact is that I have no idea what it takes to be a father. I have no idea what it’s like to have/know/be “daddy.”

In fact, the mere mention of the word “daddy” stirs extremely negative images and connotations in my head. It’s almost a curse word.

This is what’s caused me to be on my face before God and say “I’m simply overwhelmed.”

Because, quite frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’ve wondered to myself over the past couple of days if God really knows what he’s doing. He’s entrusting something so precious to my care, and I’m just convinced that I’m not going to be any good at it. It’s as if I’ve been cursed with the bad-father gene.

So, I’m leaving it all to God. I refuse to believe that God has called me to something that I can’t be equipped for. I refuse to believe that God is going to abandon me in this adventure. I refuse to believe that God has anything but good for me.

So, I say to God, “Your will be done.”

I’m scared, I’m scarred, I’m apprehensive, I’m broken, I’m inadequate, and I’m terribly frightened to move ahead.

But I know that my God goes before me. I know that my God stands behind me. And I know that my God protects my sides. Yes, Yahweh is on my side, and because of that, I rejoice.