Father's Day ...It's Complicated
By Kinyatta | The Heart of Miss Bee, Inc.
Father’s Day doesn’t land softly for me.
It never has.
I don’t have warm memories of a father who taught me how to ride a bike or gave me advice before prom.
I don’t have the kind of ache that comes from missing a good man gone too soon.
What I have is more complicated.
I have a living father.
And I have lived most of my life learning how to survive without him.
When my mother passed away, my relationship with him didn’t get better.
It didn’t deepen. It didn’t shift in the healing direction people like to fantasize about.
But something did change.
I realized that, emotionally, he had died to me long before she ever did.
Grieving What Was Never There
It’s a strange kind of grief—the kind that comes from absence in the presence of life.
He was never physically unreachable. He just never reached out.
Not on birthdays.
Not on milestones.
Not even in the quiet, aching aftermath of my mother’s death.
And what I’ve come to realize is:
I don’t miss him. I just wish he were different.
What No One Tells You About This Kind of Grief
When Father’s Day rolls around, the world floods with celebration and warm nostalgia.
Social media fills with “thank you, Dad” posts.
And if you're someone like me, it can feel like you're silently drowning in a sea of "what should have been."
But this is the truth:
Not all fathers deserve to be honored.
But every daughter deserves a father worth honoring.
And when that kind of father is never present, what we mourn isn't the man—we mourn the possibility.
We grieve:
The father we imagined he could be
The love that never arrived
The little girl inside us who was forced to self-soothe, to be brave, to move on
The hope we quietly buried in order to protect ourselves
What I Wish He Had Done
Sometimes I think about what a bare minimum effort could have looked like.
A card.
A phone call on Mother’s Day, knowing I’d be hurting.
A letter on my birthday—even if we weren’t speaking.
Some small, humble acknowledgment that says: “I know I failed you, but I’m still trying to reach.”
But even that—he failed at.
And so, in the absence of fatherly presence, I became something else:
My own anchor. My own nurturer. My own protector.
And yes, it made me stoic.
Yes, it made me strong in a way I wish I didn’t have to be.
But it also made me real.
Soft. Awake. And committed to doing better for myself, and for the women I serve.
A Father’s Day for the Fatherless (By Choice or by Pain)
So if you're reading this and feeling like there's no space for your story on Father's Day—
Here it is. This space is yours.
You don’t have to feel guilt.
You don’t have to fabricate nostalgia.
You don’t have to say, “But he’s still my dad,” if that sentence doesn’t sit right in your spirit.
You are allowed to say:
I don’t miss him.
I just wish he had been different.
I grieve what I never got.
I’m tired of being the one who always has to be okay.
You are allowed to protect your peace—even from your own father.
A Ritual for the Unfathered Daughter
This Father’s Day, I won’t post a tribute.
I won’t pretend.
But I will light a candle—for the little girl who deserved a father.
I will write a letter—not to him, but to myself.
One that says:
“You were always worthy of love.
You didn’t deserve the silence.
And you don’t have to carry the shame of his absence anymore.”
That is my ritual.
That is my peace.
To the daughters like me:
You’re not ungrateful.
You’re not bitter.
You’re not broken.
You are becoming whole—in spite of who wasn’t there.
And that, my love, is a strength far greater than silence.
💛
Kinyatta
Founder, The Heart of Miss Bee, Inc.