Fathers’ Day: Forget about the sticks and stones…

‘I hate the month before Fathers’ Day,” a friend told me this week. I was shocked to hear his confession, because I know him as a dedicated parent and passionate father.

He explained that he and his partner’s relationship was on shaky ground a few years ago and the following months were characterised by a series of extremely ugly arguments.

“She went for the jugular,” he said. “She told me I’m a terrible father and she wished another man was our children’s father.”

He said their relationship recovered. He knows she only tried to hurt him because she knew how important his role as a father is to him.

To her credit, she has managed to defeat her savage habit of abusive verbal attacks, thanks to extremely hard work.

But, he says, there will always be a little doubt in his mind about his competence as a father and his partner’s desire to have him as a co-parent, particularly when the Fathers’ Day posters appear in the shop windows.

As a dad, I can fully understand his pain. If someone had said things like that to me, I would have been devastated.

But while I have all the empathy in the world for my friend, there is a nagging little voice in the back of my mind that reminds me that I, too, am sometimes guilty of wounding with my words.

Most of us say things – even untrue things – with the intention of injuring, but we don’t often realise the extent of the damage our words can do.

We often even forget why we said such hurtful things, our victims won’t forget them.

You can burn books, delete Facebook comments and even show some backbone and apologise, but you can’t erase your words from someone else’s mind.

I didn’t have advice for my friend.

But after mulling over it for days, I can only hope that we all – him, me and you, dear reader – can learn the lesson that it’s best not to speak unless you know for certain it’s something worth saying.

If you say something, you can never take it back. And if you don’t say it, you don’t have to.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that healing is always possible, no matter how unlikely it seems.

But for that to happen, we need to forgive… which is possibly the most difficult thing in the world.

Dirk Lotriet.