The Jonathan Effect by Mike Tenbusch

Author:Mike Tenbusch [Tenbusch, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830881017
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

A Father’s or a Mother’s Love

Walk into most classrooms today in any urban high school and ask the students how many of them live with their mom and dad. You may find a couple, but the answer is usually one or none. We can act like this is just the way the world is and that we better get used to it, but I have never found a child who has believed this.

My wife, Maritza, was abandoned by her dad as a young child. Her parents and their siblings moved from Puerto Rico to Detroit in the early 1960s to work in the auto plants. Her dad got a job working the line for General Motors and bought a home with his new wife in Pontiac, near the plant. They had six children in the first eight years of marriage, and Maritza was the fourth. When she turned five, her dad left her mother for another woman. In his wake he left a faithful wife who couldn’t speak English well, had no work experience in America, and was left alone to raise their six children.

Having abandoned his family, Maritza’s dad never looked back. He lived near them in a very small, close-knit Puerto Rican community and continued to work at the same plant with her mother’s siblings, but was completely content letting his own wife and kids fall into a very difficult life of poverty without lifting a finger to help them. No phone calls on their birthdays. No Christmas gifts. Nothing.

If ever there were a father who does not deserve the love of his own child, this was it. But Maritza never stopped pursuing a relationship with him. After each of our three children was born, she dressed them up and recruited her sisters to go out to see him in hopes that his heart would turn toward her. Every time she came back dejected. Only after her mom died did their relationship change. We stopped by his house one night after a niece’s quinceañera, and he lit up like we had been close all of our lives. My kids were nine, ten, and twelve at the time, and they had no idea who he was, but he talked to them like they grew up in his house. We enjoy a decent relationship with him now. But it took more than thirty years to get there; thirty-some years of a daughter’s yearning for a relationship that never existed with her father.

That’s the natural love and desire of a child. A child, even when she’s grown, never stops asking, “Why don’t you love me?” of a parent who was not a significant part of her life. The pain of that rejection can cause deep wounds. It’s a pain that shoots out at every hint of disrespect or disappointment.

What happens when most of the kids in a classroom, or an entire school, are confronting the same issues, but have no one in their life to help them work through it? That’s the issue I ran across when I started work at University Prep High School in Detroit.

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