the father

At age forty I finally knew what my biological father looked like.

One day the internet finally revealed him.

It revealed his obituary.

The first time I ever saw my biological father he was scowling from an ‘in-memoriam’ photo arranged next to the few paragraphs that summarized his life.

The cliff notes of an absent father.

I learned more about him from this outline than I had known from the entirety of my forty years on this planet. He was married, he had children from this marriage. I learned that he “loved his family dearly and cherished all of his children”.

Well almost all of them.

I was in college when my mother finally and reluctantly told me about him. She did so in the language of vagueness.

A name, a location, a vocation, all while glancing to the floor and hoping I would let her stop talking about him.

I don’t know the exact circumstances of my conception. I never knew the man who was my biological father. All I know is that I was raised by a woman who was fragile and guarded about my entry into this world. The information I gathered was:

She was twenty.

He was thirty-two.

When she became pregnant, he was gone.

He mocked her via phone-call when she informed him of my healthy entry into the world.

And I know his name.

This is the only information my mother could manage to share with me, and even when she spoke about these vague pieces of her biography, I could see the pain in her eyes.

My mother lived a lifetime of raising a child on her own. She was left with the effects of the moment I was conceived.

He did not. He shrugged it off, moved on, and lived his life as he saw fit. He could leave the trauma behind.

My mother could not. Women cannot.