John’s family arrived in Cluj before we did. They were waiting outside my house when my father got home from work. He saw them and didn’t know who they were. John’s father got out of the car and introduced himself. My father knew John’s name and asked them in.
Inside, John’s father said, “My son, John, wants to marry Stella. We came to ask your permission.”
My father wasn’t pleased.
“Tell your son that Stella is not to get married because Stella has so much to do. She is not ready to get married.”
John’s father pled his case.
“My son wants to do this. He’s spoken to Stella about it. She wants to as well.”
My father nodded and stood there in silence.
Finally, after several moments he said, “If this is what they want, then I’ll discuss it with Stella.”
Then John’s father and his family left. My father didn’t know I was pregnant. They didn’t tell him. I was appreciative because I wanted to tell my father. You have to understand, I was very popular and successful, everything that a parent could expect from a little girl. I was my father’s everything. He loved me from the bottom of the heart. For him to find out what I did from other people would have made him very, very sad.
The next day, I arrived home with my mother and sister. I’ll never forget how I took my dad in another room and broke his heart.
“I am pregnant,” I said. “Dad, I have to get married.”
My mother and father endured a lot of trials and tribulations in their lives. They always recovered. Always. When my father and I sat together in that room and I told him that I was pregnant and that I wanted to marry John, he was so disappointed. He had endured so much emotional pain in his life from his mother dying when he was a little boy to watching his family’s fortune disappear, to going into hiding, and being a prisoner of war in Russia. However, all those horrible life experiences were behind him. Somehow, his heart and spirit were untouched by life’s circumstances. Besides, those incidents were out of his control.
As I stood before him and uttered the words, his spirit crumbled. He knew the kind of life I would endure with a man like John. He knew even if I didn’t. He felt sorry for me. How can someone so beautiful, vivacious, and promising choose so wrong?
He always had his heart tucked away somewhere safe within his spirit where nothing from the outward world could touch it, good or bad. But I was my dad’s heart. He loved me with everything he had. He knew that even though life had failed him so many times, that that I was somehow immune from that, protected by his steel will and work ethic. Whatever I wanted he did without question. Somehow in me the future was bright, pleasant, and right. Somehow because he paid so dearly I wouldn’t have to. He made sure of that.
In those few moments in that room a daughter broke her father’s heart. The heart that wasn’t touched before was vulnerable, and he was sad. Really sad. For a minute, he saw me five years old dancing in the yard, happy and carefree. He knew that the clouds were coming and his dreams for me were fading. He tried to talk me out of it. Both my parents tried. But somehow they couldn’t reason with me. So they gave up and supported me unconditionally, as before and as always. He could have scolded me. He didn’t. Instead, he just hugged me.
“Are you in love?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
I told him what had happened.
“I think it’s love, I guess,” I said.
“OK,” my father said. Then he smiled. “We are going to have a nice wedding for you and we are going to make it happen.”
I learned something important in that one moment: a parent’s love for a child is unconditional.
Tags: america, broken, communist, father, heart, inspiration, john, love, marriage, Moga, pregnant, Romania, Stella, wedding
