Dear Colleen,
The better I get to know you, the more amazed and proud I am to be your father—proud because you've grown up to be such a wonderful young woman with so many traits I admire and respect. Amazed because I know you didn't become this person overnight, and yet I feel I wasn't there for the transformation.

I'm perched on the edge of the living room sofa, reading this out loud to my daughter. I was told that doing this will bring me closer to her, and I want that very much. We've been distant since her mother and I divorced 12 years ago. Painfully distant. Now she is a freshman in college, and it's very easy for her to avoid me—a habit she's had since she was 10.

You were our first planned child. The whole setting seemed perfect. Elisa was two, the "right" age for an older sister. We had a new house, a dog—and yet something was wrong, and I was largely to blame.

What's happening to me? I'm crying. I've never cried in front of my daughter. Even last summer, when she was so furious with me that she was in tears, I kept a cool head and reasoned through the situation. But now I'm in tears, reading something out loud that I wrote dry-eyed a week ago.

I did not understand how important my role at home was, and so when you were small I was not around. I wasn't around to tuck you in, to read you stories, or to comfort you when you felt scared. And as you got older, I was less and less happy at home, and so when I was home, your mom and I didn't have the relationship that either of us wanted. Anyway, the result for you was that you lost your secure family when you were just six.

For the past month I've been in a prison directing a documentary about fatherhood. It's called BAD DADS and documents a powerful process designed to make convicts better fathers. The most touching part of the program is when the inmates read letters to their children expressing their regrets, confessing their shortcomings. No one could doubt that these felons have disappointed their kids. But as filming went on, each of us in the crew was touched by the similarities in our relationships with our own fathers and children. By the end of the filming, I was fairly sure that I should do this with my own kids.

I thought by getting a divorce I could clear out the obstacles to being a good and loving father, but it didn't work out as well as I thought. If I was wise enough to know that I wanted to leave your mother, I should have been wise enough to know how to protect you from the demands that pulled me from always doing what was best for you. Unfortunately, I wasn't. I wasn't even wise enough to develop my own relationship with you. As a result, I haven't been sensitive to you and your needs. In fact, I'm afraid I don't know you well enough to know what they are.

As they did in the prison program, I asked Colleen to prepare a list of the ways I'd hurt her over the years. It's a strange request for a father to make, so I was surprised at how instantly willing she was to do it. Maybe she instinctively saw the wisdom in talking openly about the things that hurt us most. I didn't.

I know it isn't easy for you to tell me when I've hurt you. Maybe you feel you shouldn't have to. But right now you do. I need your help to get rid of the barriers between us. You're stuck with me as a father, and I'm not letting go, so the best thing you can do is help me become the best one I can be.

Now it was her time to cry. She delivered her list.

1. One birthday you were late to pick me up, so we couldn't go to dinner and I was very disappointed.
2. You had an affair and never explained it to me.
3. You're not straight with me about money.
4. When I visit you and Ann, I feel like I'm tagging along on your night out.
5. Your guests are treated better than your own children.
6. I never had my own identity in your home. You treated me as if I were Elisa-without-her-accomplishments.
7. You don't stand up for me.
8. Last birthday, you said you wanted to buy me a ring but you forgot, and then you made me feel bad when I wasn't happy with the replacement.

Ouch. I asked for it, and I got it. Some things I anticipated, but others came as a shock. Of course I remembered the affair, but I certainly didn't remember being late and missing dinner on her birthday. Still, both had a powerful, almost equal, effect on her. Each was another proof that she wasn't important to me. Each was another reason for her to keep her distance.

I'm sorry I haven't been in your life as much as you would have liked. Please tell me what you would like now.

After she'd read her list, we didn't budge for five hours. We talked and cried and laughed about every item on her list. It was the longest and most honest time we'd spent together since—I don't know—maybe forever. And the more we talked about these hurtful, secret things, the less power they had. By the end of the day, each hurt had begun to evolve into a bond instead of a wall. The barriers were falling. I'm happy to report, they still are.

By the way, there's lots of room for error in this process. As I was winding down the reading of my letter, I discovered a typo—by me, a writer—in the most important line I'd ever write:

I love you imperfectly, but I live you very much. Dad.

We laughed. What better way to demonstrate imperfection—something that, as a father, I've been demonstrating all my life. Not that I needed to be perfect. The problem was that the little things built up, and at some point they calcified into an obstruction so big we couldn't get over it. Neither of us wanted it that way. Neither of us knew how to change it—until I watched some federal prison inmates come clean with their own kids.

I don't know if it was the letter, the talking, or the crying. Perhaps it was all three. Somehow that afternoon a wonderful thing happened. I got my daughter back…and she got her father.

For more information on Bethesda Family Services Foundation, feel free to e-mail us today or call (570) 523-0605.