When the Love Remains - I came home hoping to rebuild a relationship. Instead, I found myself learning how to carry love without expectation.

There is a kind of grief we rarely speak about.

It isn't the grief that comes when someone dies. There is no funeral. No final goodbye. No moment that tells you it's time to let go.

Instead, it's the grief of a relationship that still exists, but never becomes what you hoped it would.

I've spent much of my life carrying that grief with my dad.

As a little girl, I didn't see him from around the age of six till I was around fourteen. Those are years you don't get back. Years when a father and daughter are meant to be getting to know one another, building memories, learning who the other is.

When we eventually reconnected, life took me in another direction shortly after. At seventeen, I moved to Canada. At the time, it felt like the best decision for the circumstances I was facing, but it also meant spending the next twenty-eight years on the other side of the world.

In the beginning, I was insecure, quiet, and unsure of my worth. Like many young people carrying unresolved hurt, I was trying to find my place in the world. But life has a way of shaping us. Living in another country, experiencing different cultures and relationships, raising my children, building a career, and learning to rely on myself changed me. Over the years, I became strong, deeply self-aware, independent, and ambitious. I discovered who I was, not because life was easy, but because it asked me to grow.

When I moved back to Scotland, one of the deepest hopes I carried wasn't just about coming home. It was about family.

Especially my dad.

As he gets older, I hoped we might finally have the opportunity to begin again. Not to erase the past, but to turn a page. To become friends. To get to know one another, not as strangers connected by blood, but as father and daughter. As people.

I wanted him to know who I really am.

Not who he thought I was.

Not the hurt teenager who often spoke from anger and the hurt of abandonment.

But the woman I've become. A mother. Someone who loves deeply. Someone who has spent years learning, growing, forgiving, and trying to understand.

I don't know if that opportunity will ever come though.

One of the hardest parts is knowing he is capable of that kind of relationship. I've watched him love and raise my stepsister and my half-brother with commitment and presence. I don't resent them for that. If anything, I'm glad that they experienced a father in ways I longed for.

But I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt.

It showed me what was possible.

It made me wonder what our relationship might have looked like if we'd been given the same chance.

As I've grown older, I've also come to understand that parents carry their own wounds. My dad was hurt too. There are parts of his story I'll never fully know, just as there are parts of mine he may never fully understand.

Perhaps we were both shaped by pain in different ways.

That doesn't erase what I've felt, but it helps me hold compassion alongside the sadness.

Becoming a parent has changed everything for me.

Loving my own children has shown me just how instinctively a parent's heart reaches towards their child. It has also made me grieve the relationship I always hoped my dad and I might have had.

Sometimes I wonder if he'll ever really know how much I love him.

Maybe he won't.

And perhaps that's the grief I've been learning to live with.

The relationship remains.

The love remains.

But it may never become what I hoped it would.

Maybe healing isn't about making peace with the relationship itself. Maybe it's about making peace with the fact that some stories don't end the way we imagined. We don't stop loving. We simply learn to carry that love differently.

For so many years, I thought healing meant reconciliation. I thought it meant finally having the relationship I'd always longed for. Now I wonder if healing is something quieter than that. Perhaps it's accepting that I cannot make someone know me, or want me close, no matter how deeply I wish they would. I cannot rewrite the past or create a future that someone else doesn't choose with me.

What I can do is continue to love.

I can continue to be the mother my children know they can always come home to. I can continue to choose compassion over bitterness, understanding over resentment, and hope over regret.

Maybe that's enough.

The love remains.

And somehow, so do I.

Written by Ashleigh Stewart

‘I write about the art of living, personal inquiry and growth through the practices of yoga, meditation, faith, and philosophy. If these reflections resonate with you, you're warmly invited to subscribe and continue the journey.’