It is funny how what you are today is the sum total of your experiences. Your parents, and their parents, built the beginning of the road you are traveling on. You can try to build a better or completely different road if you don't like the scenery that came before you, but most of the time you end up with a road that runs parallel to the original one- or at best perpendicular. That original road is always the touchpoint.

My father has been gone 20 years now- but he is still vividly with me. When I feel that I am at the bottom of my reserves of strength, I hear him telling me what he told me soon after my first daughter was born. She had obviously never heard the expression "sleeping like a baby" and on top of that was plagued with colic. Since I was nursing, I wasn't even able to self-medicate my way through it, and I looked fairly desperate one day when my father came to visit. He took my daughter from my tired arms and sat with her in the other room, saying to me, "Just when you feel like you are at the end of your rope, your trouble always ends."

My baby fell to sleep in his arms. While I was fairly certain that his advice was simplistic at the time, I have come to respect it and apply it more generally to my life as he intended,not just to episodes of infant colic. There are times it has become my mantra- "This will end- this will end- this will end." Horrible times end- or at least scab over- with time; everything is finite. And the really good times end too.

And I guess this is okay- because it has to be. Each of these little good and bad bits make up the cobblestones of the road you are building and there are times when the road is damned bumpy. 

This must be what fathers are for- to walk you down that aisle whether they like your choice at the other end or not, to take the baby from you when you are near the end of that rope, to teach you how to hang wallpaper and hang in there.

I miss you, Dad, but I always hear you.