After my alcoholic father passed away a couple years ago, I felt like a survivor. For almost three decades I watched him distance himself from me as he died slowly, of alcohol and solitude. Despite his abandonment, I loved him. I still do. When he died, I felt a sense of relief because we were both finally at rest. His addiction had dissipated, and as for me, there were finally no more places to look for him in the physical world. Or so I thought. What I didn’t know was that my heart would inevitably continue searching for his love in anyone that I dated. I had no idea that the wound his absence left in me was bigger than my intellect, and certainly stronger than what my emotions could handle. Despite being a 33-year-old woman, I felt like a little girl searching for her father’s love after ending a relationship just before the holidays. I was shattered. And at a time when my social media feeds are flooded with engagements, pregnancy announcements and family photos, I felt abandoned all over again. “I thought I was past this. I’m stronger and smarter than this,” I told my therapist. I had promised myself I wouldn’t let the heaviness of another lost love consume me. “But you can’t deny your pain and your emotions,” she responded. That is when I understood that the memory of my estranged father still haunts me. It wasn’t my most recent breakup that weighed me down. I was confronted by the realization that I equate each failed relationship throughout my life with my father’s abandonment. The pain that I felt from this breakup was about more than how it appeared at face value. It was directly connected to all the times my father left me waiting by the phone, without ever calling; to all the times he said he loved me, but never showed up; to all the times I begged him to stop drinking, but he never did. Reporter Laura Rodríguez Presa and her father, Jose Carmen Rodríguez, during her third birthday celebration in Mexico before they moved to Chicago. (Family photo) The body stores feelings that overpower our intellect and logic, so mine couldn’t differentiate between another failed relationship and my father’s absence. But this is also when I understood just how much I love my father and how much I still yearn for his love, years after his passing. I realized I hadn’t forgiven him for abandoning me. Instead, I became angry that I was still searching for the love of a father I never had in the eyes of men I barely knew. I was angry with him for all the broken pieces that left me anxious and starving for affection. A starvation that made me see breadcrumbs of attention as a five-star meal. That is what the absence of a parent does to you: It makes you question your worth and makes you settle for mediocre affection. About 10 years ago, I wrote a short blog in Spanish about my father when he was still alive. It was titled “How to find the perfect man when you’re missing your father.” At the time, I hadn’t done any therapy and I certainly didn’t think that my father’s alcoholism and his absence would live in me forever. I described all the ways I wanted to be loved, which were all the ways my father never showed me. I also said that I love him regardless. And a year after he died, I also wrote about my grief and love for him as a way to process his death. So it has dawned on me now that loving him doesn’t mean that I had forgiven him. At least not from deep within and from the heart. I realized I need to forgive him in order to stop looking for him in other men, to stop settling for mediocre relationships or reliving the pain of his abandonment over and over again after a breakup. I understand that I will forever carry my father’s wound in me and that makes me even stronger. That’s a heavy truth that has taken me a while to accept. And perhaps that is the best gift I can give myself for the holidays: to finally make peace with my pain and stay hopeful for the future. I’ve been going to therapy for nearly five years. It has saved me many times and it has reshaped my life and character in ways I cannot describe. But I’ve learned that healing and grief are not linear. At least not when you’re confronted with your deepest fears and you suddenly become the little girl that begged her alcoholic father for love and attention. But that little girl and the adult in me wholeheartedly forgive my father because despite all the ways in which he couldn’t love, I’ve found that I’m resilient in ways that allow me to love myself and others. To those with an absent, deceased or estranged parent, or a family member dealing with alcohol or other addictions, I share your pain. But we must forgive in order to redefine love and to find the love we truly deserve — not the one we settle for.