Seeking Forgiveness After All These Years

He carefully tucked the crisp new $100 bills into the pages of her book before placing it into the packing envelope to send it to her. An address label waited on the table to cover the original one that was on the used envelope he was using. He didn’t think she would notice that he had reused a packing envelope with his own address on it. He thought he was being stealthy.

It had been over thirty years since he had contact with his daughter, and she had just published her first novel. Having listed where she worked on the acknowledgments page of her book, he addressed the package to go there, with the return address the same. He didn’t want her to reject the package simply because it was from him. He wanted her to be surprised by the money inside.

Her accomplishment surprised him because he had never thought she was interested in such things. But, he reminded himself; it had been over thirty years since he last talked to his daughter. She was likely a very different person now from the girl he knew back then.

To make things right, he sent the money to compensate for his past neglect. He wasn’t really sure he knew how to ask for forgiveness. Aware of his selfish and self-centered behavior as a father while she was in his life, he knew he needed to ask for forgiveness. Putting his family first was not something he had done, and it cost him his family.

He knew he had been a really terrible father and that kept him stuck all these years. He had said things and done things that had hurt her, thinking they would strengthen her. But really, they were just mean and nasty and he didn’t know why he had said them to her. One time when she was about fourteen years old, he told her she was fat and ugly and no one would ever love her. He did not know why he had said such a thing to her. She had been so cute and full of sunshine, but his words had dulled her brilliance almost immediately.

Did she still carry those words with her today? Are the scars of his wounds still present in her life, or has she healed from his thoughtlessness? Does she hate him he wondered? He wouldn’t blame her, really. He had been a horrible father.

Perhaps it had been his military training. Break them down and build them up! But, maybe that didn’t work with children. Children come new. They arrive in the world made to be built up. You don’t have to break them down like he did with his children.

Maybe it had been his own abusive upbringing that taught him to treat his children so badly. His own parents had been controlling and negative. His mother, in particular, had been a hard person to grow up around. He wanted everything her way or no way. She always put him down and supported none of his decisions.

In the end, it was his own fault his children left him. He was a grownup. He made his own decisions and chose how he behaved. Now he had to live with the consequences of those choices. No wife, no children, no friends, no family.

To be extra secretive, he had arranged, with a friend in North Carolina, to send it to him and then he would put it in the mail from there. That way, she wouldn’t suspect him right away.

Hope was the focus of this package. Maybe she would pull off the label he put on the package and discover it was from him. Perhaps it would be the start of a reconciliation between the two of them. Which would lead to his being able to reconnect with his other children, too. At least that was the secret wish deep down in his heart.

The head of security delivered the package to her office one sunny morning. She wasn’t sure why he was delivering the mail but was excited to get some just the same. After grabbing a pair of scissors off of her desk, she carefully opened the gray plastic envelope with her name on the front. It didn’t occur to her that the return address was the same as the mailing address at first.

As the envelope opened, she slid the contents out, only to find a copy of her own book. Confused, she looked at it and tried to figure out why someone would mail her a copy of her own book. Next to her name on the cover page was a heart-shaped sticker, and a few pages in was a poem about how thoughts become things.

She remained confused as she flipped through the pages of the book, desperately searching for some clue as to why it had been sent to her. Suddenly, she came across a $100 bill, then another, and another. She found $1000.00 in the book, but no note of who had sent it to her.

Shock was the immediate feeling that flooded her as she sat in her cubicle in the shared office space.

“Someone sent me $1000 in a copy of my book,” she said to her office mate.

“What? They sent you what?” said her friend.

“A copy of my book with ten one-hundred-dollar bills in it.” She replied.

Her friend rushed over to her desk and looked at the money. The two women didn’t know what to do with it. They just stared at the money and at the envelope it had arrived in. She decided to put the money somewhere safe and tucked it into her purse, which was inside her bookbag under her desk.

“And you do not know who it’s from?” the friend asked.

“Not a clue. The return address is the same as our street address here, and the postage is from North Carolina,” she answered as she could feel her heart racing in her chest.

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. No one had ever sent her money just out of the blue for no apparent reason. She felt giddy, and she couldn’t help but giggle.

Thoughts of the money and who could have sent it to her haunted her as the day wore on. At one point, she started picking at the address label to see if there was anything under it. As it peeled off, she found the original shipping label with her father’s name and address on it. She quickly slapped the new label back down jumped up from her desk and started pacing in her office.

“Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap,” was all she could say to herself.

When her officemate returned from a meeting, she shared her discovery and her dismay. She hadn’t had contact with her father in over thirty years. Why now? What did he want? What would her siblings think? Should she even tell them?

“Are you going to keep the money or send it back to him along with the book?” asked her friend.

“If he wants to give me money, I’ll take it. It doesn’t mean I want anything to do with him. He was a horrible father, and I have been better off without him in my life,” she said. “He doesn’t need to know I figured out it was him.”

One day two weeks later, she was talking to a client and the topic of writing had come up, she shared with him she had recently published a book. He said he would have to get himself a copy to read. She reached over to where the copy she had received in the mail sat and offered it to him.

After he left, she picked up the envelope. looked at his local mailing address and thought to herself what a pretty little story she had made up and been telling herself for the last few weeks.

She realized the idea of him sending the book to reach out to ask for forgiveness was all in her mind. It was not true. It wasn’t his way of reaching out to ask for forgiveness. The likelihood was it was nothing more than him trying to assuage his own guilty conscious. She threw the envelope into the trash and decided to put it out of her mind.