This song never fails to bring me to tears.  My dad and i had kind of a rollercoaster type relationship when i was growing up, but he was at least there. my parents divorced when i was 5, my mother moved to another state and I stayed with my dad.  for a couple years i'd do the back and forth thing in the summer, but my mother was unstable, she's bi-polar and was on her own rollercoaster ride, and so communications were severed.  my dad remarried and my stepmother was terrible, she hated me.  i was in the way of her and my dad.  but somehow we kind of stuck together, at least when no one was around.  when her (stepmother) and her kids were around things were different, it was her kids and then me.  she was abusive and he would stand behind her in our disagreements, and he would pull her off of me, and days later apologize for the things i had to put up with.  years later when i moved to college things between my dad i and got good again, i was hours away and he seemed to actually miss me.  Then i moved completely out of state to live with my estranged mother, that didn't sit well with him, but in a way it made us even closer, i called him nearly every day and we talked about things we had never talked about before.    Eventually all of that ended as well, when my stepmother totally misconstrued and blew out of proportion a simple question, that ended up turning my world upside down.  I had called the house to talk to dad and she answered, so when my dad got on the phone i asked why mom was home, as in did she change her schedule, or was she sick that evening.  that simple question.  she took it as why was she in her own house, and i had finally come to a breaking point with her.  after all the only reason she heard the question was because she had picked up the other phone to listen to our conversation.  which was typical of her, and her reaction was typical of trying to put a wedge between my dad and i, but this time instead of aplogizing to her, and trying to smooth things over i blew my top!  the morning after this simple question, i had a concerned phone call from my lil sister saying i needed to call mom, she needed to talk to me. this message left me couious for several reasons, why was my sister calling to tell me to call mom? why hadn't mom called me herself? what was so important that i must talk to her?  so i called my sister back to get more information before i called mother, then i called my dad and they had both told me it was because i asked why she was home the night before.  so finally i called mom and said "so i hear you want to talk to me" in the most indicnate voice i could muster, she told me "talk to your dad" just as rudely in return, i told her i already had but what did she want to talk about, that only made her more angry because i was questioning her, for once i was pushing her back, for the first time in my life i was standing up to her and confronting her.  I went on to ask what her real problem with me was, she said she had no problem...abosolutely enradged by this point i started to yell and bring up all kinds of things from the past as examples of how she had never liked me, of ways she had treated me differently from my siblings (they are technically stepsiblings, but we were raised together, they will forever be my siblings, it's not their fault their mother is a terrible person).   lil was i to know at the time that this event would end up turning my own father against me.  it turned into a huge battle.  two weeks later my dad called me to tell me that if i couldn't apologize to his wife, which he loved and would be with forever then i was disrespecting him.  i refused to apologize, the things i said were true and from the bottom of my heart, i hate that woman and the way she treated me.  I wanted nothing to do with her, i didn't want her to be a part of my life at all.  he told me that if i didn't want to have anything to do with her then i was saying i didn't want him in my life either.  the hardest thing i have ever had to do in my life was hangup on my dad that day.  for once i was going to stand my ground, i wasn't going to kiss her ass ever again, i wasn't going to apologize, i was not going to allow her to get her way again.  I suppose in a way i sacraficed the relationship on my own then.  but how could a father push his only child away like that for a cruel and kaniving woman that only used and controled him?  how could he choose to be miserable with her and shut me out?  idk it would have been easy i suppose to apologze, pretend everything was fine, but i had done that for 15yrs and i had reached my breaking point, i couldn't do it anymore.  

this was 3yrs ago, since then i have spoke to my dad exactly 4 times. 3 of those times where when i made trips home for other things, and the only time he has called me in the past 3 yrs was to tell me that one of my grandparents had passed.  the reason i write about this event at this time is because i have to make a trip back home again in 13days.  it's been 5 months since my last trip home...my lil brother got married.  a week and a half before that i had tried to commit suicide...after my brother's wedding i pulled my dad aside, the first time him and i had been left alone to talk in 2 1/2 yrs...i told him what had happened and his only reaction was "i'm sorry you had to go through that"  i rack my brain every now and that and struggle to remember if when i left he said i love you or not, and for the life of me i can't remember him saying it.  so as another trip home gets closer i'm battling with wether or not i want to see him, do i want to make yet another attempt with him just to have a door slammed in my face, or save myself the heartache of the inevitable.

but the words to this song....always bring me to tears. 

Daddy's hands
Were soft and kind when I was cryin'
Daddy's hands
Were hard as steel when I'd done wrong
Daddy's hands
Weren't always gentle but I'd come to understand
There was always love in Daddy's hands

I remember Daddy's hands
Working til they bled
Sacrificed unselfishly
Just to keep us all fed
If I could do things over
I'd live my life again
And never take for granted
The love in Daddy's hands