By Abby Aguila —
One day, in her friend’s bedroom, Cait Taylor emailed her dad out of the blue at age 16. “Hi, I’m your daughter,” it said.
She was living in New Zealand, he was in England. Not having a dad was a constant wound, a father wound. It spiked intensely painful on Father’s Day on her birthday. Every year, she would think: Maybe this year he will remember me and send a gift.
Cait had lots of problems, mental health and an eating disorder. The fantasy played through her head that he would suddenly sweep in and rescue her.
Another frustration is that she recognized only half of herself in her mother. Other things about Cait did not come from Mum. Sometimes mum would say: You’re so like your dad. Cait wondered, what was dad like?
Ten days passed until he responded. Her large email about all the problems in her life had overwhelmed him, and he wrote back a large email. He told her that he always imagined his daughter coming back into his life, and that he would never reject her, if she did.
“In the beginning we did have very sporadic emails,” Cait says. “There was so much to catch up on we would write emails that were the length of novels and it would take us both months to reply.”
Eventually, he offered to fly her to England. She could stay with the whole family, step mom and three half siblings.
Cait wasn’t ready.
“I really had to figure out my mental health,” she says. “I had to recover from my eating disorder. There were other logistics involved. It took six years from when I first reached out until I was ready to go over there.”
One key was getting saved. She learned about her loving Heavenly Father, who planned for her even when her earthly dad hadn’t. She learned to feel loved, valued, purposeful. And she needed to learn to forgive. Otherwise, their meetup could be fireworks.
She was 22 when she flew 25 hours from New Zealand to England. The plan was to spend six months. For the first week or so, she met him at restaurants twice, accompanied by her old school friend, Ant, from before she moved to New Zealand.
As he scanned the restaurant, Ant didn’t think her Dad was there.
“Oh my gosh, no, that’s him! That’s my dad,” she responded.
He saw them, stood up and moved to them. They hugged; Dad cried.
“The weirdest feeling for me in that moment was that I felt nothing,” Cait says. “I had tried to
envision this moment so many times over the years and I didn’t know how I would react. It felt like I was hugging a random person at the restaurant. This man was my dad, but he also was a stranger.”
Ant helped to move the conversation along, mostly light-hearted, superficial, ice-breaking talk. After a second meetup at the same restaurant, it was time for Cait to go home, as in, Dad’s home.
“Technically, it should have been my home too, but it wasn’t,” she says. “There was no trace of me anywhere.”
In one bathroom, she saw pictures of her dad with her half-siblings through all the stages of growing up. She saw that she wasn’t in them. She couldn’t use that restroom again for weeks.
At first, she sat in a chair out of the way from everybody. Step Mom was patient, loving, accepting – as were the siblings. Everyone went out of tier way to make her feel part of the family.
Still there were challenges. When she accompanied the family to a party and her dad introduced her as his daughter, the man laughed and laughed. He thought it was a joke. He hadn’t known that Cait’s Dad had had a kid prior to his wife.
There were good things, like seeing things she had in common with her dad. For example, they’re both night owls. They’re also entrepreneur minded.
When she found her boyfriend in New Zealand had cheated on her, she got to experience the sympathy of a dad eating ice cream on the living room floor with her, waxing philosophical about life and relationships.
Dad wondered why she didn’t cuss him out for abandoning her. If it hadn’t been for Jesus, she might have done that. She forgave him and presented the gospel to him. He listened attentively but hasn’t accepted Jesus yet.
“God introduced Himself to me as a Father first, so I would always look to Him to fulfill me in a way that only He can,” Cait says. “Then once I met my biological dad, I could have love and compassion for him and not have an unhealthy expectation of him. I could have a human expectation of him, knowing that even if he had been the best father in the entire world he could never be my Heavenly Dad.”
Cait says the Heavenly Father reaches out to every man, woman or child who has a father wound.
“You are navigating the complex emotions and feelings,” she says. “God wants you to know that he sees you. Your pain is so valid. Your longing to have a dad is so innately human. It’s the way that God designed you but even in the pain there is hope.
“There is a father who bottles every single one of your tears and stores them.”
