Love, your original dad

They always say based on a true story, and I so often want to ask just how true? Did they change the names or did they change the plot or the ending or did they write it the way we all look in a mirror- like it’s all true but only as much as we can see the truth?

I was only eighteen months old when he left, and I would be hard pressed to tell you where he went. When I was much younger than I am these days, my fantasies would include a dashing, misunderstood man whose main goal in life would be to find his long lost daughter. Realistically, I think he was submerged in a late 70s alcohol smog, awash in a sea of narcissism and woe is me.

My mother was my sole parent for a couple of years. She glosses over those days when she waxes nostalgic, but we all know what life would be like for a 22 year old single mom in 1980. I often wonder what her dreams were, if she felt resentment for me in my toddler years, as she tried to finish school and land a job. If her grief over losing her dad had pushed her to make choices she wouldn’t have ordinarily made. But they’re also the questions I won’t ask, because they’re the questions whose answers I can’t unhear.

It wasn‘t long before she found someone new, another Catholic Boy with art in his blood and alcohol in his veins. He came from a big family, but wasn’t always like the rest of them, and I think mom liked both of those things about him. They got married and in that same year, I was brought into a judge’s chambers where I was asked if I wanted him to be my dad, and I said I did. I remember the judge’s chambers but I don’t remember ever knowing that I didn’t always have a dad. It’s funny how malleable tiny brains can be, you can tie them into a pretzel and they won’t be any the wiser until they grow up and someone tries to untie the knots.

My dad was many things, talented to be sure and intelligent. He was also not many things, like sober or undivided. I have faulted and blamed him for some of that over the years, but as I’ve grown, so has my empathy. He married a beautiful woman and accepted her kid as his own and he was only five years out of high school. Instead of finding and figuring himself out, he was immersed in a metaphorical picket fence life.

My sister was born when I was five, she was a mopheaded baby with startling large blue eyes and even when I was very young, I knew that her mere resemblance to my dad’s side of the family meant I, with half my blood being from someone else, was The Outsider. I never doubted she was my dad’s favorite, and how could she not be? She favored him, she carried his traits like she had every right to, and when I was loud and angry, she was quiet and loving.

My teenage years were, as most are, oceanic. Some days my family was tranquil and beatific and others, we learned to batten down the hatches. My mother was destined to be the captain who, out of loyalty, never abandons her ship, until her own mother came down with a small case of the brain tumors. Grandma, an orphan, was (in my youthful eyes), love personified. What she lacked in physical stature, she more than made up for in a grandiosity of affection. When she died, there was suddenly this gaping chasm, and my mom was left attempting to bridge it while raising two teenage daughters and coping with a marriage that had frayed to near nonexistence. In retrospect, I remember instances when I felt like the adult, watching my mother grieve, when the world was topsy turvy, and she was reimagining what her life was meant to look like. I don’t know if it was me encouraging her to leave my dad, or if it was already something in the works, but it happened and that was that. A divorce is simply a divorce, and as a child of one, I can say with complete confidence, that seeing your parents unhappy is, as they say, much worse than watching them part.

Not long after the split, my dad finally found his way. It was a quiet moment in his life, he didn’t have any fanfare coming out as a sober man, but to an 18 year old, there were marching bands and parades. However, there was not enough noise to drown out my curiosity about the man who created me. In college, before the magical days of google, there was 411, and despite there being as many states as there are, and as many men with the same name as his, I found him. I’m not sure what I expected. I had read his letters to my mother, where he called her a cunt. I had heard the stories of his belligerence and his drinking. But that little voice in my head, that wild imagination that spurred on my writing, created a man who both looked and acted like Steve Martin, and I can only blame myself for this. At no point did either of my fathers ask me to see them this way, nor did they portray themselves this way, but sometimes believing in something enough is how we find ourselves bereft.

I met him only once. It was a dinner meeting in a strip mall restaurant whose name eludes me now. He was benign looking enough, a salt and pepper version of the pictures I had in a box in my room. A male version of me in some respects. But as I sat across from him, there was a sudden epiphany. Or perhaps I’m misremembering, and perhaps the epiphany happened later, but regardless, I was struck by the idea that I was seeking someone who had chosen to never seek me, when I had a dad who had made the choice to be mine; for better or for worse, through sickness and health, who was, currently, choosing to walk away from his sickness for us. And that was enough. Eventually I asked the biological dad to stop writing. I talked about him in vague ways to my children, whose adoration for their grandpa was fierce and loyal. And as they got older, the respect and love I had for the man who raised me blossomed into something that felt hearty and strong.

Just this last Christmas, I received a card in the mail, and upon opening it, found myself having to sit down. The writing was familiar but the message was foreign. It was a pledge of unending love, a declaration of some long kept desire to have been in my life, and it was signed: love, your original dad.

It’s been more than a month now, and I have composed letter after letter in my head to send back. The first was short and bitter, the second longer and more compassionate. the third, discombobulated and in the middle of the road. I’ve sent none of them, though I’ve inexplicably kept the address in case I decide to, at some point. What I did do, however, was reach out to the lawyer who handled my adoption all those years ago, and had him send me the paperwork, with both of my parents permission, of course. In it was a transcript from a conversation the lawyer had with my biological father, in which he agreed to not fight for custody of me. But it didn’t read the way I would expect. It read like a man who was resigned to his fate of losing everything, a man whose anger superseded his ability to be a dad, and any bit of resentment I may have held on to over the years dissipated. He gave me a gift by leaving, and my dad gave me a gift by taking me on. And so, I’m planning an anniversary party for July, where I can properly thank the dad who, for forty years on the 27th, chose me. After all, it’s not the origins that make the story. We all know it’s the plot twists in the middle and the ending where the magic lies.