What makes me… me
I have debated for some time whether or not to write this post. On the one hand, I really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. On the other, I would like for once to be able to unleash my innermost feelings, perhaps even to those people that I might hurt.
Again, on the one hand, I would like my blog to be place where people find humor, and perhaps solace, in another who has funny escapades similar to themselves. I hate to be a downer. I really don’t want to write all the time about serious issues that make people sad. Because its very hard for me to be sad. But, certain situations, especially those that are related to family holidays, often give me pause and force me to think about the obvious. Today, because it happens to be Father’s Day, I am thinking about the father(s) that I never had.
My mother married three times. Her first husband produced my half-sister, who is ten years (roughly) older than me. In her second marriage, she had me. With her third, she inherited a step-son. To my knowledge, none of these children are in contact with my mother or each other. But perhaps this subject is for a later post.
My mother and father parted ways, to my best guess, when I was 2 or 3 years old. I have heard rumors of infidelity, but I cannot make an accurate statement to that account for either party. It is mostly this lack of communication, this lack of history, that has haunted me as I slowly transform into an adult.
I do know that my father was able to have visitiation, at least every other weekend or so, until I was roughly eight years old. What I remember most was missing him dearly. I remember asking my mother when my father would be picking me up, with an adult’s memory, and wondering why he hadn’t called or when he might.
I remember one instance when I was so distraught that he had not called on his weekend, that my mother called and told him to come get me or else. I was so excited to see him, and obviously, my mother so upset, that by the end of my time with him, my mother threatened to leave me there.
This was always a scary prospect. While I loved him, and missed him, my juvenile mind could not comprehend the situations that he was putting me in. I remember times when I met new women on a regular basis. I remember the house that my father ended up in, a common house, no better than a drug house, in which several young people resided, and my mother supposedly found another woman’s underpants tucked in with the rest of my suitcase’s belongings upon my return.
However, I will also admit that I remember a long time before all of this when he was with a wonderful woman named Kristy. A time which was filled with Barbie and Ken dolls, goldfish named Chloe, and pretend-time when I could be someone, or something, else. Kristy was a wonderful woman who tried to keep in touch with me, even after her relationship with my father had dissolved. She was quite possibly the last pinnacle of true childhood that I can recall.
Shortly after all of this was a blank time. All that I knew was that my father didn’t want to see me. There weren’t many people–even grandmothers, aunts, or uncles–who wanted to interfere. My step-father adopted me, at least legally. I remember that he even threw a large party at my elementary school to try and make the other fifth-grader’s OK with my name change.
I’ll just say that my middle and high-school years were one of turmoil, as most people’s are. My mother was going through some problems that I didn’t completely understand at the time. I do feel like I was relied upon beyond my years for many things. It is just now as an adult that I wonder if my mother did not suffer from an undiagnosed manic-depressive personality disorder, in addition to severe alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. She relied on my step-father to “parent” me. By parenting, I’m referring to picking me up from marching band practices, school trips, and other menial tasks. To be fair, my step-father was always there. He was the only person that I could relay on sometimes. Even when it was beyond what he should have been doing, for personal or habitual reasons (I do also wonder if he shared many, or more, of my mother’s personal problems, namely, alcoholism).
When I was in high school, I learned, shortly after a school-wide program about the subject, that my father had AIDS. I’m not sure that I understood much about the consequences of this discovery at the time except that my relationship with my biological father would be “different”, if I chose to have a relationship with him at all. It was shortly after this that I realized that my father did not, in fact, give his paternity rights up when I was roughly eight years old, but rather was forced by my mother because of his backlog of child-support payments. It was because of money that I did not see my father every other weekend. It was because my father could not, or would not, pay for me to live, and because of my mother’s vindictiveness, that I had not seen my father or known of him until that very awful point.
Afterwards, I came to know that I had an autistic half brother, which to this day, I do not know as well as I should. This is probably the saddest part of all. My father recently has been in the hospital very sick with illnesses related to his overall disease. Of course, I find it very hard to relate and how to discuss this ordeal with him. I pray that one day we will overcome this and I will somehow know how to be the adult in a relationship that I previously only had with a child.
The relationship that I am saddened the most about is with my step-father. Now that I am a woman, I can see his faults and his weaknesses. And I am thankful for the support that he gave me when no one else would have me. Thank you. For you are the closest to a father that I have had. You walked me down the aisle and I have not seen you since. And I am sad. I love you. Happy Father’s Day.
~Ashley
