Big Feelings.

I am a highly emotional person.

That's a fact I tried to deny for years, but there is no escaping it now.

I denied it because I didn't understand it. I spent most of my adolescence bouncing between numbness and emotions that became my whole being. To make sense of it, I came to this conclusion:

Emotions run high with those you love.

When I liked a boy, he easily became my whole world.

The quality of my relationship with my best friend became equivalent with the state of my mental health.

I once cried when I had to quit a job I didn't like that paid me dirt because I had grown to love my coworkers. I had worked there for less than a month.

And my mom... oh, my mom. Both her approval and her criticism would leave me in tears, almost every time.

"That must just be how it is with those you love", I concluded.

It's funny how sometimes growing up changes nothing about your circumstances but everything about your perspective.

Growing up, I often felt guilty because I had none of those big feelings when it came to my dad.

"Do I not love him?" I would wonder.

"I don't not love him. Why wouldn't I love him? But how can I say I love him when nothing I feel for him is intense?"

When he gives criticism, we have a helpful conversation. Or I say something snarky and brush it off. But it never wrecks me.

When he says kind words, I smile. But it doesn't feel like I just won the lottery.

"I must love mom more," concludes fourteen-year-old me.

It's only now that I've begun to separate from my family of origin that I see things so much differently. And I believe much more clearly.

Those boys I liked weren't committed to me.

That friend left.

My mom... oh, I do love my mom, but she had a temper, and she is sensitive, and I spent much of my life watching her cut ties with people she once loved. Don't get me wrong, some of those ties needed cut. But my relationship with her always felt like it was on thin ice. One decision she disapproves of, and I could be next.

Not so with my dad. He's always predictable, steady, and gracious.

My parents split for almost eight years while I was a kid. My younger brother was born to another man who was never around.

But my dad never missed a visit, and he fathered my baby brother too. He would help my mom when she got stranded on the side of the road because her loser boyfriend wouldn't show up. And the way my dad tells the story, he always believed he would marry her. Everyone always called him crazy, but he never gave up hope. And eight years later he did.

That's the kind of man my dad is, faithful and dependable. And unlike so many relationships in my life... my standing with my dad was never in question.

That's why my world didn't shake when he gave his opinion. I always knew I had his approval, even if I didn't have his agreement. I knew there was nothing I could do to make him leave. Not even emotionally. He's in it for the long haul. I don't have to have big emotions. I have steady ones.

Over the years as I've grown in my emotional intelligence and in my appreciation of my father, I wouldn't say my feeling have gotten more intense, but they have gotten bigger.

I'm big proud. Big excited. Big grateful.

I'm blessed with a man who can do anything for a dad, but one thing he chooses to do consistently: Love me.

And it's so safe.

So stable.

Not world altering or mood breaking.

Just steady.

I'm big grateful.