Father's Day means something different to me now. I used to ignore it altogether, having learned that Hallmark doesn't make cards that convey the complicated sentiments of daughters whose fathers have opted out of the job. Father's Day was one of those holidays for other people, grown women who still use the word "daddy" when describing the men who raised them. People with intact families, or at least, intact relationships with their fractured and fractious families. Father's Day was about remembrance and appreciation, a blissful nostalgia for something I'd never really had. I've yearned, like so many women, all my life for a daddy, someone wise and patient and full of sparkling humor; someone whose eyes saw only my strengths, and never the many places where I was clumsy or stupid or not up to par. I wanted a daddy who worried about the all the ways the world might disappoint me. A daddy who helped me grow and let me go, but stayed forever my confidante. A daddy from a movie or a television show or a fantasy.

There aren't many things harder than allowing a parent to be human. Children, even grown-up adult ones, hate and fear the messiness and loose ends that come with that. Desires and compromises and mistakes feel selfish and almost rude when our parents are guilty of them. Didn't they know better? Couldn't they control themselves? Why didn't they think of their children? Then we reach adulthood and start making some of those same mistakes. And suddenly, nothing is as simple or tidy as we'd expected. We want to deny that our parents were young once too, and wanted things for themselves that had nothing to do with us. Material things, experiences, a taste of something forbidden - passion or freedom, another chance at inventing who they would become. As children, we made those journeys with them, some of us better for the travel, others strewn like so much wreckage along their paths.

Being a daddy wasn't enough for my father. Boisterous and loud as we were, we couldn't fill his empty places. He didn't look at us so much as through us, and whatever he saw on that faint horizon ultimately beckoned him away. Our demands were too many, and our fierce need to anchor him to us only made him more desperate to be free. Some men are meant for other things than fatherhood, and he was probably one of them. His life and all of ours became tangled in a knot of anger and sorrow and blame that eventually choked us off from one another. In the movie that I hoped real life would be, there would an easy and magical way to undo that damage and reverse those years. But the closest most of us get to a happy ending is often simple acceptance, without bitterness, of the hand we've all been dealt.

My daughter is a lucky girl. She has a daddy, a fact that reflects one of the few outstanding choices I've managed to make as an adult. My husband is a wonderful father. It's the only job he's ever truly wanted. From the time Olivia was born we wrestled over her. "Give me that baby!" he'd say. "No, it's my turn to cuddle her!" I'd respond. "She wants her daddy!" he'd exclaim, scooping her into his arms, her obvious glee confirming the truth of his words. He left his engineering career to stay home with her. He changes diapers, prepares meals, reads books, plays games, tends boo-boos, blows bubbles, draws bunnies on the driveway in chalk and delights in her every movement and utterance. His name is always on her lips, from the moment she awakens to her last drowsy burblings at bedtime. Daddy, daddy, daddy. I would be sick with jealousy if I wasn't so completely overjoyed at the way the two of them have bonded. She'll always be a daddy's girl, and that's fine with me.

I've been celebrating Father's Day for almost five years now. I buy my husband cards and the requisite golf shirts and other silly gifts, and I plan dinners and outings for him and his now ten year-old son. Last year it was a surprise hot-air balloon ride for the two of them. That summer afternoon, Olivia and I watched their balloon become a tiny speck in a perfectly blue sky, and as she clapped her tiny hands and waved, I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat.

With every June that passes, Father's Day has come to feel more a celebration of something wonderful, and less a day of sadness and regret. Father's Day isn't for perfect daddies; they don't exist. Father's Day is for the daddies who teach, and still allow themselves to learn. It's for the daddies who work and the daddies who play. It's for the daddies who struggle to be daddies, even when it's lonely, and hard, and exhausting. Even when families are broken and distance conspires against them. Even when it seems easier to just let go, these daddies hold on. Father's Day is for the daddies who stay.