Daddy's girl

This Father's Day I asked Zach if he shared any of the same feelings I had on Mother's Day (oddly threatened by P.J's birth parents, a tiny sense of competitiveness and weirdness knowing we're not biologically related to P.J like they are). He said that's it different for him because P.J's birth father doesn't even know she exists, let alone was he there to share in her birth or have any connection to her. Zach will always be the only father P.J has ever known or even will know about. Zach gets exclusive rights to the title of "Daddy." I love that.

During his Father's Day sermon our pastor listed several statistics about fatherless children. They were staggering. (http://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/) With each one I felt more and more grateful that the Lord had spared P.J from a life without a father. While her birth mom may have been able to love her unconditionally should she have chosen to keep her, absolutely nothing could replace the role Zach plays in her life. It pains me to think how different P.J's life would have been had she been raised by a single mother, and it saddens me to know that somewhere out there is a man who helped create my beautiful, bright, spunky little girl, and has NO idea. His loss is our greatest gain.

We will never know how much of P.J's looks and personality are from her birth father. I hope she learns to be okay with that someday. I hope she can be assured knowing that Zach is exactly the dad God wanted her to have and that she has all her needs met by him and by her heavenly Father. I trust Zach completely with this all important role of leading P.J in the ways of the Lord, guiding her and loving her in the same way our Father does for us. I hope someday when P.J begins to wonder about her "real" dad, that she'll quickly look to Zach and see that he's as real as they get, and they don't get any better than him.