I never had a dad, or a father, or a pop. I had a step-father for a while, but that… didn’t end well. I’ve lived over 50 years with no father/daughter connection. It was always my reality, as I’m sure it is for many people, that there was simply no dad.
I’ve often been fascinated by adults who have loving relationships with their parents, but only as a novelty. I could see it, witness it, but that was all. I was never moved by it.
My mom left me when I was twelve, basically wielding a big, shiny pair of scissors and clipping off our love with a decisive snip!, letting it fall unceremoniously to the floor, where it wriggled and gasped for a while before finally fading into nothingness. I’ve been essentially parentless most of my life.
Last month, on father’s day, I finally found the man behind the name misspelled on my birth certificate. He passed away in 2020, but I spoke to his siblings—who each revealed their unique version of him. At first, it was charming, discovering an uncle, an auntie, and a few cousins. But a few days after these telephone conversations, I was left with a prick of sorrow. Aspects of their descriptions felt familiar enough for this man to be recognizable. He was my dad.
And now, about a month later, while I do feel a little more whole, I also realize the immense loss. Certainly it’s regretful that I didn’t reach him before he died. But more than that, what I missed as a girl and as a woman—to not have had that figure in my life—is painfully evident. My perspective on a father’s love is clearer, and almost every day, I’m seeing what I was denied. Also, it turns out I was the only child he had, so he missed out as well.
I don’t know what happened after I was born, why my parents didn’t stay together. I only know my mother was eternally unhappy, and by the 80s, all three of us were just floating around out there, separate from each other. It seems to have been a genuine opportunity missed. It’s unlikely my young life would have played out worse than it did if we’d stayed together, or if I’d at least known him. It’s possible, of course. But from what I’m constantly learning about what it means to be human, unlikely.
So, all I can say is this, find that lost family member; a parent, child, or sibling, whomever it may be. Don’t wait, don’t make excuses, or worry about rejection (though I know that’s a hard one), just find them. Now.
I’m disabled. I have been for a number of years, but not many people are aware of it. For one thing, I don’t have a lot of people in my orbit; a handful of good friends whom we left behind when we moved out to the sticks, a spouse and a son, and about a dozen doctors, PAs, therapists, etc. Aside from cashiers, pharmacists, and gas station attendants I don’t interact with a whole lot of people. And when I do, it’s a treat as I’m mostly home alone six days a week. When I’m around others, I’m usually chipper and friendly despite being in pain and living in a fog.
This is where things get dark… and a little sexist.
In the world I live in, women are expected to make others (generally, men) comfortable. I’ve been trained, starting when I was a teenager, to not disrupt the genteel existences of the few adults around me. So I quietly internalized having been abused. My guardian—my uncle—made it clear (without actually saying the words, of course) that he didn’t intend to deal with what my mother’s estranged husband had done. As a teenager, I had strong opinions about what I’d been through, and in response, my uncle expelled me from his home, washed his hands of me. I learned at 15 not to make men uncomfortable.
Maybe we shouldn’t be comfortable with the way those in power treat those who are vulnerable?
I want to pause and acknowledge I’m obviously writing from the cis-gender perspective. The movement to recognize that human gender is more complex than a simple binary breakdown is another conversation for another time, and one I support with enthusiastic hopefulness. I’m no expert on gender fluidity, or really anything, but it seems a number of societal problems could be relieved by not pigeonholing people into a rigid and limited system of self-identification. But, again, that’s a whole ‘nuther conversation. I’m a cis-woman, that’s where I write from.
Moving on… For a while there, health insurance was hard to come by for a lot of Americans. I needed it and didn’t have it for a decade, so I masked through the pain to work so I could hopefully earn it. And I still mask, as a survival strategy. Animals do it, too. They mask so other animals don’t kill them. I masked so I could be employed.
The effect of this was that I was usually dissociated from my own body—which had its pros and cons.
Pro: I could get a temporary placebo effect from pretending everything was okay, but it was temporary (con). Pain serves a purpose. It’s there to tell you to stop and tend to the problem. I was telling my body to shut up and wait its turn, and it shouted back, “Fuck you! Pay attention to me, now… or else!”
I’ve been living in the “Or else!” stage since the early 2010s. And today, the Social Security Administration is asking me to demonstrate how hurt I’ve been, and for how long.
Now I have to experience my body and learn how to live in the torturous truth.
I’m still afraid of making people uncomfortable. I tend to apologize for being sick. One of my doctors is wonderful about it. She’s a good egg. I’m lucky to have her. She’s the one who finally figured out that I have Ankylosing Spondylitis. But I’m careful with the others—especially the men. When men are uncomfortable, generally they disengage. Apparently many of them can’t help it, I guess it’s a human weakness. So I read the room.
I want, I desire, to live in the dark, torturous truth.
I want to learn how to live there; I will be pissed if that superpower was ‘nurtured’ out of me by adults who were really shitty at adulting. I need to occupy that pit, to hang brocade curtains and burn scented candles there. I will make that pit my homely home full of books, dog toys, and home-baked bread, since those adults failed to provide one for me. I will live out my days in my comfy-cozy pit of despair, and not sugar coat a damn thing for anyone.
Of all the misfortune I’ve experienced, being homeless as a teenager, and generally just not ‘belonging’ anywhere, even when I did have a physical roof over my head, made the biggest impact. I was in my late forties before I had a place I felt no one could take away from me. I subsisted over 30 years in survival mode with precious little time to examine circumstances. But I was able to keep little scraps of my experiences, and now I draw upon them in my writing.
Maya Angelou said,
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I remember how I felt, even if I don’t remember the fleeting details—the words on the wind or the plans made or promises broken. I remember events that go back decades like they happened last week. I wish I could forget, but I don’t, and I take that feeling and put it on the page to connect with someone else who felt it, or who is experiencing it now.
And I learn things as I write.
As a kid, for example, I didn’t label myself as such. I don’t know if other kids do, but I didn’t. Even as an adult, I still don’t differentiate between girl-me and woman-me for reasons that are probably best explained by a psychologist. My perspective is this: I’m just me. Thus, I had no idea there was a limit to my purview at age 12, 13, 14, etc., and I tried to solve big problems—I needed answers—at these ages that were far beyond me, and I got no help. So I failed… hard. Now, more than three decades later, I finally see the failure was not because I stink at being a person.
After years of carrying that failure everywhere, I now know it wasn’t mine. Still…
Thirty. Years. A failure.
I might have made this discovery if I hadn’t written about it, but I also may not have. So I will write, because I can’t wait to see what else untangles itself, and I want to tell other lost girls what I discover, because I’m pretty sure we’re not alone.
Sheryl and I made a pilgrimage on a Sunday afternoon in the spring to a park in my new neighborhood. Uncle Lawrence had sold the stable-side bungalow and the three of us moved into a bigger house a few blocks from school. I’d started working part time at the mall, but my boss usually didn’t schedule me on the weekends, which was fine with me. I much preferred to work nights after school. Sheryl and I journeyed there to examine the site where a girl from the next town over had been attacked, and to hang out, and maybe get some burgers for lunch.
An orphaned teen girl bounces around Northern California in the 1980s. Buy now at Amazon
We were near a grouping of benches, standing there with our big purses, looking at the ground. I imagined moonlight and shadows outlining heavy boot prints in the mud, and a girl our age lying alone after midnight, still and prone, blood pooling in the hollows of her shut eyes. Her name was Lisa, a very common name, but she also shared a less common last name with a friend of mine who’d moved to the same town the previous summer.
“Fuckin’ —A…” was all we could say, while Lisa recovered in a bed at the medical center a mile or so away.
“She was the one at your birthday party?” Sheryl puzzled.
“No no, it’s not her. I forgot to tell you.” We’d heard most of the details of the attack from people at school, rumors swirling in the quad and exaggerations in the locker room over the previous week. Finally and thankfully, a school photo of the girl published in the paper revealed that it was not my relocated friend.
“Ohhh, okay.” Sheryl said, with a look that acknowledged it didn’t matter which one of us it was or wasn’t. “But still…”
“Yeah, no shit.” I answered.
When we tired of staring at cut grass and acorns, we plopped down at a stone bench to smoke. We talked about those who were alive and uninjured: Danny, Jamie, our math teacher, Sting. We talked about walking to over for some chicken tenders. I hadn’t left my uncle a note and would need to get home by four or so. He’d gone to church and was planning to drive to Gram’s for the afternoon. A scruffy dude at another bench had been hunched over scratching something into the seat of it, but had now taken an interest in us. I glanced at him every so often, and this time he was erect and staring us down.
“Do you know that guy?” Sheryl asked.
“No. But he’s coming over here.” The man rose and executed a series of twists with his left wrist, afterward jamming the hand into his trouser pocket. He’d closed and concealed a butterfly knife. I only knew that’s what it was because Jamie had one with perforated brass handles. He’d taught me how to flip it open and closed.
The man stood in front of us. He was wearing too many shirts.
“Hey, I’m not a weirdo or anything.” He wasn’t much older than we were. “I just wanted to say ‘hi’ and see if I could bum a dime.”
“I’ve got some change,” Sheryl said and pulled a slitted rubber coin pouch from her bag.
The man plopped down in the grass in front of us and reached into the pocket of his oversized flannel outershirt.
“Oh.” He made a little noise and looked down at his pocket, tugging at the front tail of the shirt to keep it taut.
“Ohhhh my gaaaawwwwddd!” Sheryl cooed, her eyes widening.
“Is it alive?” I asked when I saw what he was holding.
The grey and white fur quaked in his cupped hands and Sheryl leaned in to get a better look at what seemed to be the cutest kitten in California.
“He’s the runt. He can open his eyes, he’s just been sleeping.”
Sheryl insisted on holding him, and the babe stretched in her palms, pushing two tiny white paws in the air and opening its mouth.
“He’s older than he looks.” The man assured us that he was old enough to be off mother’s milk, but he still needed some food.
“Don’t you need to get him home for feeding?” I said.
“We’re homeless. That’s why I was hoping you guys had some spare change.”
“Oh yeah, no problem.” Sheryl said. “This little guy is going to need to be fed four times a day… at least.” She handed the squirmy kitten to me and emptied her coin purse into the man’s hands.
“Oh thank you!” He stood up so fast it startled us both. “Hey, can you guys watch him for a minute? I need to go get some supplies.”
“Sure,” we said, and Sheryl mentioned a store around the corner.
“Great.” He turned and stopped. “Actually, I have to go to a friend’s house to pick up a fanny pack. My buddy is fixing it so the cat can ride in it.”
“Oh, okay.” Sheryl and I looked at each other. “Should we come with you?”
“Naw, it’s just right by here.” He turned forty-five degrees and walked off saying, “I’ll be back.” I rubbed the kitten on my cheek, and we smiled at each other. When I looked back up at the man, he was striding a beeline to the West, then turned, in the middle of the park, another forty-five degrees and continued along the new trajectory.
The kitty kept us occupied for a while. We let him walk around on the concrete tabletop, dragged the corner of her bandanna in front of him as a makeshift toy, and giggled at his clumsiness. He was a runt, but certainly not sickly, and he did open his eyes.
“What time is it?” I asked and scanned the park. There was no one else there aside from an ownerless dog carrying out a sniff inventory of every tree.
Sheryl consulted her ring watch. “It’s almost four. He’s been gone over an hour.”
“I’m hungry.” I suggested we get lunch, keeping our tiny companion concealed in one of our purses, and hope we run into the man on the way back. We could get a milkshake for the kitten.
“Don’t you have to be home by four?”
“I can’t go home with a kitten, my uncle wouldn’t be very happy.”
“I can’t take him, we live in an apartment,” she countered.
“I know.” We both sighed and scanned the park. The dog was gone.
Our return from lunch was just as fruitless. We sat at the same bench and ate. By five-thirty, the best plan we could come up with was to walk around the area and look for the man, and that’s what we did. The later it got, the more I knew I’d get an earful when I got home, and that it would be much worse if I had a kitten in my purse.
We walked exasperated up the avenue and a big stupid car pulled up beside us. I was grumpy and thought it was some joker flirting, then I realized it was Danny and I felt hopeful. For no valid reason I thought the presence of a guy would make everything better. We crawled into his car and briefed him as we drove around. At six forty-five there was still no sign of Kitten-Man and I instructed Danny to take me home.
Sheryl came in with me to help explain the situation to Uncle Lawrence, which turned out to be pointless. He was acrimonious, but the cat was just an excuse. I went to my room and slammed the door, plopping down frustrated on the edge of the bed and held the sleepy animal.
Sheryl came in and handed me a photocopy. “Your uncle wanted me to give you this.” It read:
Tired of Being Harassed By Your Stupid Parents? Act Now! Move Out… Get a Job… Pay Your Own Bills. Do it While You Still Know Everything
