“Congratulations” was spread all over the Facebook wall of one of my close friends. It didn’t take long to deduce that she was engaged. Her phone call to me that followed hours later was filled with excitement for her upcoming nuptials. I jumped for joy for her and the desire to plan my own non-existent wedding won over for my nightly activity that summer day.

My dear friend Sarah and her fiancé, Perry, started dating mere months before my boyfriend Randy and I began our relationship. Yet, I knew a proposal was nowhere in our near future. We had determined over the course of several conversations that an engagement while we were still in college would be bad timing. I agreed with his points and he understood mine as to why we weren’t ready to get married, but my thoughts still gravitated to my own wedding. The marriage bug was nipping at my mind.

Upon walking in the door of my childhood home on Bulwer Street in Detroit was the living room. But on some days the room was more than just a place where our family gathered, it transformed, with help from my imagination, becoming a grand ballroom. As a toddler I twirled around the room and sang “Tale as Old as Time” while the television displayed scenes of Belle falling in love with the Beast in my favorite Disney movie. I idolized Belle; I wanted her unique yellow dress, a pretty flower and to dance around a majestic ballroom with my prince. Back then my Prince Charming looked nothing like the Beast. He called me Pookey and I called him Daddy.

He saved me from the Gastons of our neighborhood – spending twenty bucks at the home of a drug dealer to retrieve my stolen toys for the sandbox that took up part of the backyard. He twirled me around a gymnasium transformed into a “ballroom.”  I wore a fancy dress and white sparkly shoes with a slight heel. I even got a pretty flower to wear around my wrist. It was my Belle moment.

I know that I will have that Belle moment again – when the spotlights are focused on me as I dance with my prince. My prince has changed over the years. My dad vacated that spot when I was in elementary school. It filled again with our housemate and close family friend, who treated me like his own daughter. Then came Randy, who will be holding me as I once again twirl around a dance floor during our first dance as husband and wife.

Sarah and I have been friends for a long time and I had just assumed that I would be a member of the wedding party and she assumed that I would say yes when asked. My decision to be in her bridal party brought about responsibilities, but none brought back worse memories than shopping for dresses. For Sarah’s wedding, I found a dress I adored and wanted to wear over and over again. I was in the company of my closest friends when I fell in love with a piece of fabric and purchased my very first bridesmaid’s dress. But until that moment in David’s Bridal wearing the dress I loved, I wasn’t fond of being a bridesmaid or dressing for the part. The last wedding I participated in was the one in which I gained a step-mom. I didn’t get to choose the dress I wore or even keep it. I hated the way my hair was done; my bangs stuck to my forehead and my head itched beyond reason because of the large amount of hairspray that kept each strand in a precise place. I would never wear that burgundy color or buy the matching colored shoes that stained the bottoms of my feet.

I was entering high school when my dad told my brother and I he was going to be getting remarried. My already large family would be gaining three new members: my step-mom, stepbrother and stepsister. We had spent Sundays with them at their home in Flat Rock, but I didn’t feel like part of the family. My dad’s fiancée tried to be our mom – not exactly what a teenager needs or wants. I already had one and she was doing a heck of a job trying to raise my brother and I on her small income and my dad’s not-paid-enough, child support. If my dad were going to get married again, she’d have to be my friend, not my mom. I always had this gut feeling that she didn’t like us, but because my brother and I were such an important part of my dad’s life she allowed us to be part of the wedding. I would stand up as a bridesmaid for her and my brother would be my dad’s best man.

I store this memory in the section labeled as “HORRIBLE” and that is not my teenaged mind exaggerating. Getting ready with my step-mom and her sister was not a joyful experience. I was a fish out of water, a teenager in a world of adults. I just didn’t belong. I didn’t feel loved as I put on a dress I said I liked, but lied about. Or when someone tried to put mascara on my dead-straight eyelashes. Or when the photographer came in to take pictures of her. I spent much of my time in that room sitting on the bed trying desperately to fit into her world. The actually ceremony wasn’t any better. I walked down the aisle with my uncle and thanks to his joyful attitude and sense of humor I smiled as we walked. Seeing my dad marry another woman is not a memory that I hold dear to my heart because if I had my only wish come true from those days it would have been for my parents to get married again – or never even divorce. My dad was not allowed to love another woman beside my mom. My step-mom walked down the aisle behind me and watching her walk to my dad wasn’t like the wedding I’d pictured in my dreams. I didn’t see the expressive look of love on their faces, but I did see the hurt in my brother’s eye, as he stood tall for his 12-year-old frame and bravely next to my dad. When the words, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” were said, they sounded like nails scraping across a chalkboard. They scared me.

I’ve never been scared of words before. I was like Belle, words spoke to me as they floated off pages of books and stirred around above me as I listened in on adult conversation. There was so much fear that came from my dad’s relationship with my step-mom. It made me raw emotionally because I despised the idea of their marriage so much and I just wanted to be part of the typical American families like all my friends.  She didn’t help our relationship when she practically eliminated the amount of time that I spent with my dad. She decided that Flat Rock was not a good place to call home and they should relocate to Ludington. Our time together was already limited and we bonded over what we could. Sunday wasn’t meant for church; it was meant for dad time and race day. My mom would drop my brother and me off, and Dad would cook as we all sat around the TV tuned into a NASCAR race. I wasn’t quite as excited about the idea of cars driving in circles for hours upon hours until I saw my first crash. I was hooked from then on. Dale Earnhardt Jr. was my favorite driver and inspired the red and black years of my life where everything from the walls of my room to the clothes I wore somehow contained a little bit of red or black because that was the driver my dad loved.  He would drop us off at home when the race ended. The desire I have to own a Chevy Avalanche came from one trip to the Detroit Auto Show, where he climbed into the front seat of one and I climbed into the back and he told me he wanted to own one. But with my dad in Ludington, I couldn’t bond with him over NASCAR and looking at cars. I was too young to drive and four hours in the car – just one way – wasn’t worth the day trip. When they left, he promised nightly phone calls. He’d get to tell us about his day and we’d get the opportunity to do the same. But the frequency of the calls decreased as the more time he was away. Eventually most nights, I went to bed without talking to him. He had stopped calling or expected that I would make the call because he didn’t. I was told on more than one occasion that he couldn’t be the one to make the calls every night and that I’d have to make an effort to call him – that the calls couldn’t just be a one-way street.

That’s how our relationship always was, though, a one-way street. I’d pour into him, wanting to be loved by him more than anything else in the world. I worked hard to make him proud of me, even from a distance. I got straight A’s. Tried out for every sports team I could and made most of them. I stayed out of trouble – I didn’t do drugs or drink underage. I went to youth group and hung out with my “church friends.” I didn’t date until high school. I wanted to be the perfect daughter so maybe he might come back home to us. His absence was so prevalent as I remember major events and it frightens me to think ahead to what future events may be like or what differences in the relationship the two of us share will occur.

As part of a Saturday interim ritual Katie, one of my roommates, and I would plan our weddings. She told another close friend of ours and I about how excited she was to have her dad walk her down the aisle and raved about how awesome their relationship was. The same doesn’t apply for me. It never has. My dad and I haven’t been buddies. He disappointed me on so many occasions. Not being there for soccer or volleyball games and swim meets. Not teaching me to drive or all about cars when I was 16. Not dropping me off at the airport when I went to Zambia, Africa for two weeks. Not buying me a car when I needed one when my brother already had one. Not going with me on college tours and seeing the place I’d call home for the next four years for the first time on move-in day. I, with a straight face and heavy heart, said, “I don’t know if I’ll have my dad walk me down the aisle.” For the first time to my friends I really showed my vulnerability about the relationship I share with my dad. They don’t know about the disappointments and broken promises. The truth and the seriousness behind that statement drew strange looks from my friends because it’s tradition to have fathers walk their daughters down the aisle and it’s proper to have him give me away. It’s just a tradition, not everyone has to abide by it and I may not. It supposedly began when fathers gave away their daughters to the groom during arranged marriages. The daughters were given to the son of another family at a price. Daughters were a father’s property. I don’t see myself as my dad’s property to give away to Randy. I’ve always been independent and the moment my dad stopped paying child support I stopped being his property. Now the “giving away” tradition is a sign of respect and love that a daughter has for her father. Was it possible to give that to a person who once rescued me from the “Gastons” of the world, but a little bit farther down the road broke my heart into a thousand pieces when he married my step-mom?

By the time I had walked at my high school graduation, my dad was divorced again and back “home.” I was excited to have him back in my life in a more permanent way, but our relationship still needed a lot of mending. I’d get mad at him about something he did, call him and tell him. I had no problem talking to my dad and tell him what he was doing wrong. I cried to him on more than one occasion about how hard it was to be his daughter – to try to prove to myself that I was worthy of his love. Without fail, in every card he gave to me for whatever special milestone in my life we were conquering written in his left-handed scrawl was, “I’m so proud of you” or “I’m proud to call you my daughter.” But that didn’t feel like enough – even his tears at my high school graduation and honors ceremony didn’t make me feel like he was worthy of my forgiveness about the mistakes he made during my childhood.

It took years to finally reach a point of forgiveness about my parent’s divorce and for him leaving us. Sometimes I still look back on those “lost” years with anger and wish that they didn’t have to happen.  But with the help of Randy, my insecurities about a divorce happening to us are squashed. We’ve talked about my fears and how difficult being in a committed relationship is for me. Always, there is this voice in the back of my head that reminds me, when he and I fight more and more often, of how my parents held screaming matches and how their relationship ended. But, there’s another voice that goes with it and it’s of the man that stands in front of me, holds me close and whispers in my ear, “We will never be like your parents. I love you too much to ever let you go.”

As I get prepared for Sarah’s upcoming wedding, I think about standing at the altar and watching Sarah walk with her father. I think about him handing her over to Perry and how special that must feel for Sarah’s father. As a daughter, I want my dad to have that opportunity. I want him to have that moment when he looks Randy in the eye and mentions guns or making sure that he doesn’t hurt me. I may not feel that my dad deserves it on most days, but he’s my dad. I have half his DNA and until I marry Randy, his last name is mine too. I have time to think about this decision – about giving my dad the chance to walk me down the aisle. I’m not getting married tomorrow. I have time to mend our relationship and make it one where there is no doubt in my mind of his worthiness of walking me down the aisle and giving me away.