The Bravery of Trust
My wife, Grace, and I have known each other almost our entire lives. Our families are great friends who’ve been reveling together for 30 years. Grace and I became close when we hit our early teens and have remained good friends ever since. Later on, Grace moved to Guatemala where she lived, worked, and had two children. In the April of 2015, she moved back to the US with the two kiddos. Two months or so after she moved back to the states, Maine specifically, we reconnected, got engaged five months after that, and were married a year later.
Her daughter, Matilda, was 5 at the time and the oldest of the two kids. Immediately, I loved Matilda, as is simple to do when meeting the children of your best friend. Our first few times together were fun and exciting. Mati had taken a liking to me, up until she had picked up on the romantic elements of my relationship with her mother.
All of a sudden, the dynamic between Matilda and I changed drastically. She had recently been plucked from her family, friends, and culture and I became a symbol of even further changes to come. I was a threat to the bond with her mother and represented a tear in their family thread.
I was naive in thinking that if I was kind, and took the kids to do fun things, and bought them new toys, they would love me in return. I anticipated gratitude and welcome upon doing, honestly, very little work.
Matilda’s attitude towards me became aggressive. She would ignore me, tell me she hated me, and occasionally lashed out physically. For months, Grace and I discussed how to help Mati through this. Maybe it was better if we called the whole thing off? Maybe it was just too much for her?
We understood Matilda’s distress but struggled with how to help ease the pain or confusion of it. For me, it was an abrupt lesson in empathy.
We watched Matilda struggle without any resources, which was incredibly painful. For months the sadness and confusion persisted, even flourished. Every week, the situation seemed to get a bit more dire.
Then we had a breakthrough.
During all of this, I was living in Lowell, MA, while Grace and the kids lived in Maine, and they had come down for the weekend. Before they arrived, I hid a handful of My Little Pony toys around my apartment. When they settled in, I told Matilda that I had a surprise for them, but the ponies had all escaped and were hiding throughout the apartment. I needed her help in finding them, so we had an impromptu pony hunt. She grew more excited with each little toy she discovered and was even more eager in getting me to hunt with her!
We were sharing a moment — a tiny adventure together — just her and I. That little activity seemed to bridge a vast divide between us.
I think what happened was we finally shared something. I believe Mati viewed me as an opponent. The person on the other side of the tug of war rope, with her mother’s affection in the middle. I gained some trust by doing something with her, rather than merely giving her something to play with, and hoping that would work. In retrospect, I was trying to buy her love and trust, rather than earning it in a way that made sense to her. We’ve since found that sometimes the most complicated emotional issues have the simplest solution…companionship.
The second one was back in Maine the following weekend. I was excited about the progress we had made during our previous visit, but that was squashed pretty quickly during an emotional tantrum of “I hate you”s. In a moment where it was just Matilda and I in our parked car, I, for the first time, asked in plain words “why do you hate me so much?”. She, in turn, responded in plain words, “Because you love mama, and not us.”
In an act of unrivaled bravery, she spoke clearly and honestly, putting words to her feelings. A feat that some grown, calloused, harrowed adults cannot accomplish. It was both courageous and illuminating. She had finally let me in.
That moment gave me the chance to explain that of course, I loved her as well. I got to tell her about how I called and talked to her on the phone as a baby, and how I thought of her often, even before ever meeting her. Things I had said before, but without her ever truly hearing them. She was showing me respect simply by listening.
What “saved” or “healed” or “jump started” the father/daughter relationship between Matilda and me was not bestowing upon her gifts and treats, but HER courage in being able to let me in. Her trust and love and respect was something that needed to be earned, and it don’t come easy. As it shouldn’t.
Now, two years later, we’re great. She’s my daughter. I’m her Papi. We don’t meddle in “step” titles or technicalities. As we say to each other often, “If you feel it in your heart, it doesn’t matter what you call it.” We have our struggles, no doubt, but at the end of the day we trust each other, and that’s about all that matters.
Written by Qeepsake User, Ben E.
