The Little Girl Within (Day 1 from, Letters to a Friend)

 

The Little Girl Within

 

            The Lord has been whispering in my ear that there is a story that needs to be told, but more importantly, there is someone that needs to hear it. This morning I ran across a dear friends’ post on Facebook that said, “Sometimes God wraps His glory in hard circumstances, ugly obstacles, or painful difficulties, and it just never occurs to us that within those life-shaking events is a fresh revelation of Him. AG” We all go through hard, ugly and painful times and if we have been traumatized at some point in our lives our heart can begin to shut off His voice that lies within all of us,

                My mother told me that when I was a little girl I would stand at the door with my face pressed against the glass for hours waiting on my daddy to come home, but he never did; my mother didn’t know how to tell me that he never would. She just said one day I stopped waiting; I was too young, at three years old, to understand what was happening.  I don’t remember anything about him and I certainly did not know my life was about to change.

            How do you tell a three-year-old her daddy had died?  I was told when I was older that he had died in a car accident. My grandparents would tell us about him but never mentioned how he had died. They would show us pictures and talk about the things he liked to do, like laying in the yard and looking up at the sky creating images in the clouds; I often wondered what he saw. Over the years I put together a puzzle from everything I was told about him; he was tall with dark hair and blue eyes, he wrote the lyrics to a few songs that he sold for pennies; I learned he would carry me around on his shoulders, and that I looked a lot like him. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I learned he didn’t die in a car accident, but he had died in a car when he ran a hose from the exhaust into the car through a window. For years I kept that knowledge to myself locked away with the images I had created of him. Now all I wanted to know was why, had I done something, why did he leave me? My life would have been so different if he hadn’t abandoned me.

                By the time I was five I was told I had a new daddy and we were going to move away; so we were told to say goodbye to everything and everyone we had ever known to begin a new life. When I was an adult my mother told me I would wrap my arms around my new daddy's leg and whatever I wanted he just couldn’t say no. I was in my thirties when my mother told me, one day I just stopped laughing and pulled away from everyone. When she would come to look for me I was sitting in the closet or in the corner of the room on the other side of the bed. I had a secret I was told not to tell, and I didn’t until that day I told my mother. My new daddy had brought home someone to watch us while they went out, a man he worked with, not a nice man. He made me feel like a bad girl and ugly inside, and I became afraid. Little did I know my life was would change forever.