A/N: This is BJ's regret, and let me tell you, it didn't come easy. I had a
hard time coming up with something that BJ might regret. However, I hope
you enjoy it.
All Grown Up
Look at her; she's so beautiful, the very image of her mother. Floating down the aisle, to the arms of another man, to leave this church no longer a Miss Erin Patricia Honnicut, but a Mrs Isaac Robert Pierce. And not even the Pierce I would have liked, my new son-in-law is no relation to Hawkeye. She was my baby, and now look at her, she's all grown up, the only threads that kept us together, gone.
Perhaps I wouldn't take this so hard if I had loved her more, maybe I could have felt joy in giving her away to Isaac, an active interest in my daughter when she was younger would have made this so much easier.
We had slipped so far apart when I came back from Korea, I didn't know how to hold her or what her favourite songs were, or what her baby-talk meant, and she didn't know or even like me, she'd scream blue murder until she was back with Peggy, and every time I was near her, she'd eye me with distrust. So, naively I let Peggy take over, hoping that in time, Erin would get used to the strange man, her Daddy.
I was wrong, Erin and I slipped further apart, when she was five, it was not me she ran to when she grazed her knee, but Peggy who hated blood, and when she got first prize in the spelling bee when she was 7, Grandma knew before I did, and I had picked her up from school that day. By the time Erin was 10, I was just a person, whom she rarely spoke to and never touched, and introduced to her friends as 'my father'. About Erin's 12th birthday, we stopped talking, there was never any anger or resentment, we just never had the need to talk.
In Erin's teenage years, things came to hurt the most when I realised that she was growing up, and that I had been oblivious to 90% of it and excluded from the other 10. So on her 18th birthday, my gift was thirteen words, written on a pretty card, "I love you Erin Honnicut, I always have, and I always will, Daddy" It broke the ice that had formed years earlier when I left for Korea. We began to talk again, not much, just letters scribbled between her classes or my patients, and finally a promise to spend a day together, father and daughter once more. However, her life was too busy to fit to my schedule, and my life was too busy to fit to hers, and before the day when she and Isaac announced their marriage, Erin and I never had our day alone.
And that is the reason I stand here, watching my only child get married. A child I barely knew, and will now probably never get to know. The only time I remember her as mine is the first time I held her, just a red-faced, vulnerable, naked baby, needing her daddy's protection, and now look at her, kissing her new husband for the first time, she's all grown up.
All Grown Up
Look at her; she's so beautiful, the very image of her mother. Floating down the aisle, to the arms of another man, to leave this church no longer a Miss Erin Patricia Honnicut, but a Mrs Isaac Robert Pierce. And not even the Pierce I would have liked, my new son-in-law is no relation to Hawkeye. She was my baby, and now look at her, she's all grown up, the only threads that kept us together, gone.
Perhaps I wouldn't take this so hard if I had loved her more, maybe I could have felt joy in giving her away to Isaac, an active interest in my daughter when she was younger would have made this so much easier.
We had slipped so far apart when I came back from Korea, I didn't know how to hold her or what her favourite songs were, or what her baby-talk meant, and she didn't know or even like me, she'd scream blue murder until she was back with Peggy, and every time I was near her, she'd eye me with distrust. So, naively I let Peggy take over, hoping that in time, Erin would get used to the strange man, her Daddy.
I was wrong, Erin and I slipped further apart, when she was five, it was not me she ran to when she grazed her knee, but Peggy who hated blood, and when she got first prize in the spelling bee when she was 7, Grandma knew before I did, and I had picked her up from school that day. By the time Erin was 10, I was just a person, whom she rarely spoke to and never touched, and introduced to her friends as 'my father'. About Erin's 12th birthday, we stopped talking, there was never any anger or resentment, we just never had the need to talk.
In Erin's teenage years, things came to hurt the most when I realised that she was growing up, and that I had been oblivious to 90% of it and excluded from the other 10. So on her 18th birthday, my gift was thirteen words, written on a pretty card, "I love you Erin Honnicut, I always have, and I always will, Daddy" It broke the ice that had formed years earlier when I left for Korea. We began to talk again, not much, just letters scribbled between her classes or my patients, and finally a promise to spend a day together, father and daughter once more. However, her life was too busy to fit to my schedule, and my life was too busy to fit to hers, and before the day when she and Isaac announced their marriage, Erin and I never had our day alone.
And that is the reason I stand here, watching my only child get married. A child I barely knew, and will now probably never get to know. The only time I remember her as mine is the first time I held her, just a red-faced, vulnerable, naked baby, needing her daddy's protection, and now look at her, kissing her new husband for the first time, she's all grown up.