I was afraid of Papa. He placed fear in me.
At least this is how I thought to perceive my feelings at first.
I feared my father.
I felt and heard the Jiminy Cricket in me always asking if my next step was right whenever I found myself to be in a questionable predicament.
I could feel myself tremble from worry upon finding myself at a moment of uncertainty.
I always wanted to be sure I was doing right, that discernment to know and yet, seemingly lost at a moment’s decision.
As I grew up, I began to understand that very fear instilled within me.
It took me almost a half century to realize I had not been afraid of Papa. I was afraid to disappoint.
Papa was merely that symbol of forewarn to always choose and do right.
It was when I felt to have done wrong where I feared the truth in my actions. They had not been right and Papa would soon find out if he hadn’t already.
Just the very thought of Papa stood in my thoughts as a symbolism for integrity.
Just several years over a decade ago, my former teaching colleague, Roy, a retired professional baseball pitcher who then attained his dream job of becoming a teacher, placed a copy of the saying in my room out of my request, “Integrity. It’s what you do when no one is looking.”
To be integrous is an ever-going training and expectation for the heart, the mind, the body, and the spirit.
As I grew, I trained myself to believe Papa knew what I was doing even if he wasn’t around- until in faced reality, one day (picking up the phone to call him one day only to be reminded he had passed three years prior), Papa had long gone.
I feared wrong.
This has helped me throughout my journey of life.
Nearing my golden years, just shy of a few days, I smile upon myself to think, I’ve continued to serve myself well.
I don’t mean that in a vein way.
I mean that in a fulfillment way. To serve the father’s expectations instilled within me.
I naturally brought in five amazingly, strong, healthy, beautiful, and intelligible children, each of which I made sure to take care of myself that I eat and exercise my heart, mind, body, and spirit far before the child growing within me even entered this world.
When I think or look at each of my children, I know my part was my all to now where some must face their own destinies based off their own reaping.
I have loved and devoted myself to my husband from the very beginning of our time, over thirty years ago. No other man can say they have ever managed nor were invited to violate the holy matrimony I have strongly upheld to the one man of all our five children together.
I can look at my husband, I can look at our children, and together, I happily can proclaim- one.
I have given my children the gift of one father.
I have given my husband the gift of one wife, one that is good, one who can say, “All of our children are unquestionably yours. All ours.”
We are one.
I can and have silently laughed at the whispers of doubts of my loyalty in all my years of wifing (wife-ing) – the love, loyalty, or enthusiasm a lawful woman offers incessantly to one partner for life.
Promiscuous mentalities can only think in a way where no one else could ever stay good and faithful to one. Good, I am. Faithful I am. I prove to no one, but One.
Jiminy Cricket could vouch such claim if ever need be to care to prove to anyone who would probably and, still, must convince themselves otherwise.
You can give aide to the blind to see and the deaf to hear.
You must leave alone those who are blind and deaf by choice.
I look at my husband and know even more each day, “My darling, I am yours and you are mine…”
This is my own gift to me.
Each time I hold my husband’s hand, I know and am certain, he holds the hand of one honorable, loyal, faithful, integrous, and devoted. That, I am. Jiminy Cricket knows.
I have silently laughed, knowing each of our children have had their share of naughty moments. And, yet, I think, “Good. They are not the stiff-necked kind who don’t know how to embrace still, the child in them. Good that they know how to break through for autonomy. Good that they know how to step away from discomfort of restriction and confinement so that they may grow, develop, and thrive beyond the grounded foundations they each were put in.”
The spirit of a child lives and lingers within.
A seed is meant to push and break through in able to flourish to become how each were meant to blossom and bear fruit.
Had I not done the same, I would not be breathing the air of leisure and peace to that which I have blessedly followed through the words of Jiminy Cricket within me.
As I have said to my students within my many years of teaching, “Nobody is perfect but we can each strive for excellence.”
I am saddened by the world around me who have not taken the time to reflect on correction or forewarns.
I see now those who have been left behind- marked by obstinance, pride, denial, and lack of accountability, daubed with, instead, the victim mentality, blaming everyone but themselves of their own found circumstances, no matter how many times they see themselves still immobilized from the same input/output results.
While I cannot deny for being angered or impacted by the attempts of others to steal, kill, and destroy the hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits of one another, I see those very same only hungry and thirsty due such depravity.
Hungry and thirsty each day and yet the well is there to supplement their thirst, too busied by their eyes wandering as to the satiation filling others.
I know now to only hope each such lost soul, in the trickeries of life’s enticements to only lure those into covetousness, strength will be found to no longer serve such path of farther direction from their father’s forewarns.
In a world where so many no longer understand the genuine care and love of a father to which I see has infiltrated the minds of even those raised by one- there is confusion; there are more to be lost.
I can offer nothing but the willingness to always prove that when willing and believing in the father, one can faithfully arrive to safe destinies.
Each of us were destined to become, to do, to fulfill, to achieve, to be granted powers beyond our understanding.
That belief, even when we cannot see, is sometimes all we’ve got. Upon arriving, time and time again to a focused destiny, time and time again, one is reinforced that such resilience, such faith, is answered at will.
As I deeply felt Rafiki’s words in the latest movie, Mufasa: The Lion King, When destiny is close, the earth rumbles.
How many of us have been tricked to believe that every stumble was a downfall instead of just a redirection or, perhaps, even just the ground rumbling beneath us in celebration of what awaits ahead?
I have seen my children and my students express disbelief and thus, fear, of their potential. There is this familiar oddness to one’s behavior when what waits ahead is perceived to be undoable.
That sabotaging corruption that one works to create for oneself as if to use as the whirling funnel of doubts to strike upon the finish line just to then say, “I knew I couldn’t do it.”
Self-prophesying. Self-destructive.
If I had not journeyed my very own moments where I ignored Jiminy Cricket’s words of advice to follow another direction where I, instead, followed my own voice in the shallows to have only wasted time and energy, I could perhaps not understand.
But, I understand well.
How many of us stopped at the moment of what felt like too much?
How many of us surrendered to perceived defeat?
How many cowered from a fight they already saw themselves to have lost before even stepping into the battleground?
How many have fought for the wrong thinking or fooled to be with and in the right only later to find themself following and in the wrong?
How many gave up simply too soon, thinking now, how close they were to the finish line?
The look around, seeing so many eyes aimlessly going about. One walks to an undesired, unwanted destiny while another already accepts having no destiny at all.
I think, while both lost, which will be farther from their true destiny in the end?
Into my golden years I enter and like Ruby Bridges who, on one day, just trying to go through the mob of all those trying to discourage her from breaking through educational segregation for others, stopped to turn around to pray for those very same in silence.
They know not better.
Funny how, though I had only read of Ruby Bridges as a mother empowering her own children to break through barriers, I came to realize I had been doing the same all my life.
Forgiving others. They know not better. Literally, in many cases.
When a father corrects their child, forewarns them of dangers that creep within the realms of this world, when he makes orders to follow what he deems the right way, there are those who simply will object and do otherwise.
More and more, each day, that Jiminy Cricket inside to serve as the voice of conscience is ignored.
There are those who follow not and thus, know not, their Father.
Thank you, Papa.
