Dear Daddy

Copyright © 2012 Robin Leigh

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-6587-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6588-0 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6589-7 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012915935

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/1/2012

Contents

Dear Daddy

Dear God

Hey, God!

Who Are You? Where Are You? Why Are You?!

Hey You!

Leave Me Alone!

I Hate You!

Hey, God! Are You Out There?

Dear God

Oh, Sweet Jesus!

Dear Daddy

This book is dedicated to my Creator and Father as a simple act of obedience.

Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.

—Hebrews 13:15 NASB

Dear Reader,

The words contained in the following pages summarize a journey forty-two years in the making. As recently as six years ago, I could never have imagined myself where I am today. Yet here I am sitting in my tiny office tonight, typing out words that convey a lifetime in memories. Writing proved to be the easy part; remembering was infinitely more difficult. There is, however, a certain release that can be attained only through opening one’s heart and mind to the past. The doors that can be opened not only through writing and remembering, but also through reading and relating, are my primary motivations for following the pull that has been placed so firmly in my heart to share these details of a very private life with you.

For most of my lifetime, I have held on to the notion that the people within my life viewed me in one of two ways; either they did not really know who I was or they pitied me, and preferring solitude over pity, I continually chose the former. I had pity covered and certainly did not need help to maintain it. I think that I may have had self-pity refined to an art form.

I would encourage you to read this work as a testimony and not as a reflection of my own self-pity. It was not for pity that I put pen to paper, but as a trail of bread crumbs to both encourage you and reveal to you what it is that God loves so much about you.

In peace and love,

Robin Leigh

When and how do we begin our earliest conversations with God?

I believe that as young babies, maybe even yet to be born, we begin life both knowing and being known by Him. The Bible tells us that He knew us from the very beginning. That would suggest to me that even before we were conceived, the Lord of all the earth knew who we would eventually become. I truly believe that as we grow, we also begin our walk down various paths that take each of us away from God.

I don’t remember much of my childhood before the age of four or so, even though I am quite certain that my journey away from God began earlier than this. My first steps could most accurately be defined not by a particular word or deed but by a desire. Indeed, the very first time I thought with my whole heart me first, I began a lifetime pilgrimage away from my Papa in heaven. I think that maybe I inherited this curse directly from my parents, and we as the human race have been genetically passing it along to our children dating all the way back to Eden, where Eve received it as a gift from Satan himself. Almost all of my wrongdoing stems from a will of my own desire, from this me-first mentality. This is my battle.

Dear Daddy

My story begins in the summer of 1968. Born the youngest of four children, most of my family lived in a largely nondescript suburb of Chicago, Illinois. My oldest brother was living with his mother almost four hundred miles away; my other brother having died at six months of age from pneumonia. Mom missed her little boy; his memory is burned into my mind. I didn’t understand why we weren’t permitted to grow up with our brothers. Our home was filled with memories nonetheless.

My parents owned a small but well-kept three-bedroom home complete with a tidy yard boasting a multitude of brightly colored petunias in various hues of red, blue, and purple. I remember my mother in the yard, planting those small flowers in the flower beds always with a complement of bright red gladioli in the planters. This array of colors in our front yard repeated itself year after year, beginning each spring just after the last frost, and the scene would persist until fall when each of those blooms turned crisp and brown. Every year beginning in May my mother would labor to give life to those little spring flowers, and as they grew throughout the summer, it seemed as though her efforts were being rewarded by those plants, now much larger as they filled in the spaces in the flower beds and blanketed the ground in front of the house. However, every fall she was rewarded only by the death of each and every flower. Not one of those blooms would grace our home with an extended visit. I am still uncertain as to why she embarked each year on this rather labored quest only to be reminded each fall of life’s lessons in futility, but she continued to plant new flowers every spring. She would step back and take in a measure of joy at a job well done.

My first real memories begin to form when I was a young girl of about three or four years of age with platinum-blond hair and deep blue eyes. My memories of this time are vague at best, scattered images that are separated by gaps in time. These images are often peppered with memories of emotion, occasionally ones of immense sadness and pain. My grandmother’s stories fill in some of these gaps for me, as I recall her tales of an infant version of me learning to walk early in life. My arm was tied up in a sling on many occasions throughout my childhood, beginning at the age of about eight months because my shoulder had been dislocated. After having lost the ability to crawl, I just stood up and walked. By the time that I was six years old, my shoulder had been dislocated more times than I can remember, much less count.

Our mother took us to church every week, and I attended Sunday school like any of the other kids in my church. I learned some of the stories and enjoyed my time there—one hour, once a week. I actually looked forward to it. There were some very nice people in that church, and they never yelled; they never raised a voice or a hand at me. For one hour, I could disillusion myself into believing that I was good. But those Bible stories were just stories to me. I didn’t—I couldn’t—view them as anything more, and I hadn’t made a connection that they might somehow be real. My mother went with my sister and me every week; my father never in my memory crossed the threshold of that or any other church during my lifetime.

I can remember a great deal of arguing in our home from the time that I was four years old. My father was gone most nights, as he worked as a bus driver and drove a route that led from Chicago, Illinois, to Columbus, Ohio, and back again. During his off time he would spend many of those evenings at a local bar. His frequent absences, his frequent drinking habit, and money concerns were a source of many an argument between my parents.