My Dad’s Rejection Was the Best Gift He Ever Gave Me
By: Dr Kasey Lynn
Tags: Life, Understanding, Rejection, Love, Parenting

Photo by Joshua Abner

My Dad was a loving provider and guiding protector of our family. And perhaps the thing my dad was most adamant about was that his children be successful in life.

My Dad never attended college. No one in his immediate family had ever attended college. He was the oldest child and the first in his family to migrate from the South to seek a better life up North. I was the oldest of his three children and my Dad had particular aspirations for me.

As far back as I can remember, my Dad owned a construction company. Growing up, every member of my immediate family and most of my extended, worked for my Dad’s company except for me. I was never allowed to work with him. I always felt that it was unfair and unwarranted. I had always admired families who passed down their skills and their family businesses generationally. They were passing down earned rights the family had worked for, slaved for, sweated for, bled for, and prayed for. But not ours and that incensed me and made me intensely resentful.

Even as an adult in my twenties and early thirties, I disagreed with my father’s decision to keep me out of the family business. What a narrow-minded, selfish decision! I thought. Family businesses passed down generationally understand how to retain wealth, so why wouldn’t my Dad allow me to help grow his?

Only in the last decade of his life did he fully articulate why he’d decided not to allow me into the family business.

He explained that wanted me to do something more — to be something remarkable, something exceptional. He wanted me to be so much more than how he viewed himself. He said that early in my life, he recognized a spark in me that he wanted to shine beyond the walls of his small office.

He looked at the family business as a constraint, a limitation on my future. He always saw me in a much greater position, with a higher calling, and experiencing far more in life than he did. He saw me influencing many more people than I’d ever reach or touch in his office, working construction. He didn’t believe that working with him was an opportunity for me, but more so a barrier to my growth.

My Dad could see potential in me and the promise my future held, though I could not see past the blinders of the rejection I felt for decades.

However, his rejection was, in essence, an unselfish manifestation of his unwavering love for me.

I wish that I had intentionally sought clarity earlier in my life. I waited too long to seek an understanding of his real intent. Perhaps he could not articulate his passion for me to “do more,” and maybe I was too immature to understand what “more” meant to him at the time. But now I am thankful for his rejection because he saw potential in me that I was incapable of seeing in myself.

I’ve traveled the world several times over and have been fortunate to experience many fulfilling opportunities throughout my business career. I’ve accomplished academic and professional feats that I would have never imagined possible 30 years ago. I’ve been transformed by so many amazing people I’ve met along the way.

Sadly, my Dad died from a battle with cancer in 2017. A few months after his passing, I quit my corporate job to take over his construction company. It was what he finally wanted only if I were willing to take the helm. I was. Looking back, some may say that my life had come full circle, I disagree because it has definitely been a more linear journey for me.

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