My Father's Hand
Book Details
Author(s)Nanci Haigler Flynn
PublisherHis Hand Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN / ASINB00JIHMXIS
ISBN-13978B00JIHMXI2
Sales Rank124,577
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Her birth was ordinary enough, she supposed, but that was the last time her life could have been considered ordinary. The baby was barely two weeks old when her mother slid into postpartum psychosis that held her in the state mental hospital for the first year of the child's life. Cared for by her cold, distant paternal grandmother by day and left to the devices of her father by night, the child endured abuse that no person of any age should ever experience. But she survived.
She spent her childhood as her father's play toy and the bewildered target of her mother's irrational behavior that was eventually diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. When she was 12, her mother died of ovarian cancer after spending a year in still another state mental hospital, and her father shipped her and her little sister off to a children's home some four hours away from his home. But she survived.
She stumbled through her teens and made it half way through college, then married a kind and gentle young man who had no idea what a damaged person he had brought into his life and his heart. He endured for more than ten years the painful effect of living at close range with a badly broken human being, bringing two little boys into the world with her, and then he left. She picked herself up and learned to be a single parent, and she survived.
Two years later, she married again and remained married for more than 30 years to the person she believed to be her best friend, then she realized that she was wrong in that belief. Over those years, though, she learned to see her own brokenness and to gradually learn her way out of the co-dependency that permeated the first half century of her life. She slowly but steadily climbed out of the damage she had done to herself and others in her life conducted under her own control, and she crawled into the hand of her Heavenly Father, where she placed control of her very self and all that was hers. And she survived.
Today she still lives firmly ensconced in her Father's hand, where she sometimes dances and sometimes hunkers down to take refuge from a world that can still be a painful, frightening place. And today she doesn't merely survive. Today she prevails, she rises up, she triumphs over all that has and does come against her, always in the strength to be found only in her Father's holy hand.
She spent her childhood as her father's play toy and the bewildered target of her mother's irrational behavior that was eventually diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. When she was 12, her mother died of ovarian cancer after spending a year in still another state mental hospital, and her father shipped her and her little sister off to a children's home some four hours away from his home. But she survived.
She stumbled through her teens and made it half way through college, then married a kind and gentle young man who had no idea what a damaged person he had brought into his life and his heart. He endured for more than ten years the painful effect of living at close range with a badly broken human being, bringing two little boys into the world with her, and then he left. She picked herself up and learned to be a single parent, and she survived.
Two years later, she married again and remained married for more than 30 years to the person she believed to be her best friend, then she realized that she was wrong in that belief. Over those years, though, she learned to see her own brokenness and to gradually learn her way out of the co-dependency that permeated the first half century of her life. She slowly but steadily climbed out of the damage she had done to herself and others in her life conducted under her own control, and she crawled into the hand of her Heavenly Father, where she placed control of her very self and all that was hers. And she survived.
Today she still lives firmly ensconced in her Father's hand, where she sometimes dances and sometimes hunkers down to take refuge from a world that can still be a painful, frightening place. And today she doesn't merely survive. Today she prevails, she rises up, she triumphs over all that has and does come against her, always in the strength to be found only in her Father's holy hand.
