There is no cavalry - growing up fatherless

Something I have been thinking about of late, perhaps moreso in the last two years than any time previously, is the implications of growing up without a father (the plurals sound wrong in that sentence, but that is how I want it anyway). It's very hard to work out, on your own, what those might be, when you simply don't know any different. For most of my life I considered my upbringing fairly normal and didn't think much of it. But in recent years I have started seeing the areas where things were not "normal" and realising that my own behaviour, at times, reflected that perhaps everything was not so fine (eg I had something of a psychosomatic condition for a while after my father died, then an eating disorder as a teenager - which was reasonably mild and short-lived, before my older sister dobbed me in and I was marched off to the doctor, but would be labelled an eating disorder all the same).

I came across someone last year who gave me a glimpse of what it might have been like to have had an involved father (and I had to go away and sort out my reaction to that), and have come across various other things since and heard sermons about father-headed families and met people who believe in the importance of fathers and then Mark Driscoll said things, particularly at the ENGAGE conference, about fathers and daughters that made a fatherless daughter need to get the walls up real fast, or weep.

How these things usually end is with the statement that if you didn't have a father, or a good one, well God is your father. But I have to admit that I just shrug internally to that, and think 'whatever that means'. I think one of the ironies is that the people who perhaps most need to hear that God is their father are often the people with no real basis for understanding it. And I think that I also, subconsciously, don't place much importance on knowing God as a father (and sometimes it just feels like it would take too much emotional energy and effort to work that out).

So, I have been trying to find something to read about all this and have had no great success in finding anything relevant. I don't want to read books about being a child of divorce, which tend on focus on being "abandoned" and everything that stems from that. My Dad didn't abandon us, he died. And so I just want to read something on the effects of not having a father around, without having to read about anger, resentment, forgiveness and all that.

If you type "father daughter relationship" into google you get 750,000 entries, many of which are for children whose fathers chose to leave or are written to fathers with teenage daughters. Some are full of the horrible statistics on the probable outcomes for women without fathers (and thankfully I seem to have been spared from most of those - except the eating disorder I seemingly had to have). I found one resource, by Mary Kassian, called, In My Father's House, which looks like it could be worth a shot, and Tim Challies, who very kindly answered my email, suggested To Own a Dragon by Donald Miller (to be read with caution and discernment - and his review indicates that he is not convinced that it is a good book, and it is also about a father who left so I am a little sceptical) but if anyone out there knows of any other, well please leave a comment.