My Father’s Day Slice: Rewriting the Rules of Love

For 55 years, I held onto a quiet weight. As a middle child, I was raised with the old notion that everything had to be shared—toys, attention, space. But for me, the weight was specifically about my birthday. I spent years feeling guilty about having to share my day with my dad.

I idolized him. His creativity, his work ethic, his kindness. Everyone knew him—he was the man who knew the names of over 500 people he supervised. I grew up watching him and my mother act like ships passing in the night, both working hard to keep our world turning. Because I loved him so much, I downplayed my own celebration. I became a master at being a wallflower, convinced that we all cared more for him than we did for me.

For a long time, I tried to shift my focus to Father’s Day for my dad, hoping to compensate for the "lost energy" of his January birthday and holiday exhaustion. But I didn't realize until much later that I was simply operating from a place of scarcity.

Epiphany of the Pizza Pie

About five years ago—perhaps because I am a "late bloomer" who is only now fully stepping into my own—I had an epiphany. I was asking a friend if they believed love was conditional. He told me: "No, love isn’t conditional, but relationships are."

It was a total "aha" moment.

I realized I had been treating LOVE like a deep-dish pizza. You know the image: rich, layered, and strictly limited. If there are eight slices and you take two, there are mathematically fewer for everyone else. For years, I lived in fear that by simply being myself—by claiming my own birthday—I was 'taking' a slice that belonged to my father, leaving him with less.

In my child's mind, I had linked "love" to the physical heart—the organ. I thought of the heart as a physical object that had to be divided up. I didn’t understand that love is not connected to the physical; it is connected to the ENERGY of goodness, light-heartedness, and deep, boundless connectedness.

When you start to understand love as energy rather than a finite resource, everything changes. You stop feeling like you are losing a slice. You start realizing that there is enough room for everyone, for all of your life.

Moving Beyond the "Child Being"

I am a highly sensitive person. I feel deeply, and for most of my life, I lived in confusion because I didn’t have the role models to help me process layered, complex emotions. I didn't know how to let them flow through me.

But I am grateful now for the time to discover the words to understand the experiences that got stuck in my "child being." These concepts—this In-Sight—have helped me realize that I am meant to do this work. I am learning to rewrite my internal Operating System, moving away from scarcity and toward a life of Omnioriented abundance.  In fact, Omnioriented is my next great focus—it is how I am rebranding what my childhood dyslexia did for me. I grew up in an era without the resources we have now, which forced me to develop my own unique, multi-layered way of seeing the world.

My father is gone now, but I find a soft, quiet relief in that. I believe his beautiful energy has been reframed into a brilliant white star. I know his brilliance lives in me, and I will continue to explore that until my last day.

Today, on Father’s Day, I am finally letting the "pizza" story go. I am claiming my own space, knowing that there is no competition for love. There is only the flow. Warmly, -Paula

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Dad helped us build out Parachuting Penguins' first storefront in 2002. Thank you for being you!