Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (3 page)

A
few days later my mother and I met my father at the zoo. This was now our third meeting and I was still waiting for the familiarity to kick in. I watched as my father greeted the other invitee to our outing: his adult daughter, my half sister. Tall like my mother, she gave him two quick kisses on the cheek and laughed as she rested her hand on his arm, speaking to him in Catalan. She flashed my mother a warm smile, and they exchanged an awkward handshake. Then she turned to me, her smile broadening. I instantly liked her, even though there was nothing about her that made me think of a sister. She was in her twenties and lived with her boyfriend. She probably wasn’t interested in Nancy Drew or Chinese jump rope.

She bent down so we were looking eye to eye. We did the same thing I did with our father at first meeting—searched each other for something familiar, something that confirmed that we were tied together. I couldn’t say anything if I’d wanted to. She spoke Spanish and Catalan. I spoke English and Italian. The language barrier freed us to simply look and smile while the monkeys squawked in the background.

Watching my sister with our father, I knew she had something I wanted. She had a familiarity with him that only time together could create. Even if everything changed that day, I knew she would always have more years with him than I did. And I knew she had a brother. I saw pictures in our father’s apartment of the two of them together. A brother.
I
had a brother. If you define a sibling as someone who is connected to you by blood only.

My sister pulled a little cloth doll out of her purse. It had a purple dress, yarn for hair, and could fit in my hand. We took turns walking the doll up each other’s arms, making it dance, giving it movement that didn’t require real dialogue. We connected without words, and when it was time to say good-bye, she told me through our father that she couldn’t give me the doll; she needed to keep it because her mother had given it to her as a gift. I felt a tinge of irrational jealousy. Was I surprised she had a mother? Of course not, I knew how these things worked. In fact, her mother had a son my age with another man. More tinges of confusing jealousy. Apparently both her parents had moved on by the time I was conceived. It was further confirmation that our family was complicated. And with complication comes more complication.

Hugging her good-bye, I didn’t know where I fit into my father’s and sister’s lives. Things for her would not change after the zoo. She would go back to meeting her friends for tapas, studying psychology, and joining our father for lunch. But I wanted to believe that things for me, for us, would change. She wasn’t what I had pictured in a sister, but I would take it. Really, why would this twentysomething woman need to have a relationship with me? I didn’t offer her much more than a reminder that her father was a little reckless and irresponsible.

A few days later, my mother and I packed up our matching luggage and boarded a plane back to Seattle. She had a job waiting in Seattle, and the school year was starting. As the plane landed at
Sea-Tac Airport, the evergreen trees outside the tiny window and the cool, damp air felt wonderfully familiar. My mother rented a furnished apartment on Capitol Hill and began looking for a house to buy. I didn’t think of it at the time, but buying a house meant the nomadic life was over. No more fresh starts.

One day when we were in the apartment, something triggered a wave of emotion that came out all screamy and angry.

“Why doesn’t he write? Why doesn’t he call? I hate him!” I yelled at my mom.

I kicked the sofa and ran into the bedroom. I threw a pillow on the floor. And then another. I picked them both up and threw them as hard as I could at the wall. I felt the anger in my legs, arms, fingertips. It wanted to burst open, and I was confused by it.

My mom came running in after me, giving me what I wanted: someone’s attention. But really, her attention was something I already had. I wanted his.

“I don’t know. Calm down,” she pleaded.

“I don’t wanna calm down!”

That was true. The crack had been forced open when I met my father face-to-face. The color of my eyes and the dark circles under them were a reflection of his. I saw them, him, every time I looked in the mirror. I couldn’t overlook the reality that had been steeping for nine years. My father was ignoring me. And now, after he’d met me, the sting was worse. He now knew what he was missing. And he still chose to stay away.

I ran back in the living room, looking around for something safe to hit without really being destructive. Even in that moment I wanted to be responsible, to hold it all in. But the hurt was leaking out with increasing intensity. It was so different from my controlled behavior that it felt scary and great at the same time. My mom tried wrapping her arms around me. I pushed out of them. I wasn’t ready to be comforted. I wanted to be angry. Didn’t I have the right to be angry?

The anger quickly moved to grief. And the sobs came out in bellows. A childhood’s worth of confusion and abandonment raced out like an exorcism, and though I didn’t like feeling out of control, I wanted to let out what had been trapped in my chest for so long.

Finally, exhausted, I leaned into my mother and let her do what she’d wanted to the last twenty minutes. She wrapped her long arms around me and rocked her baby. She used her hand to wipe the tears from my face. We both knew it was the most she could do.

For all of the holding tightly my mother did, I was created to be loved, to be held, by two parents. No matter how much she loved me, she couldn’t be my father too. I was left flailing, insecure, wanting something more.

S
o, what do you think?” Michelle asked. “Who was Jesus?”

I leaned against the wood-paneled wall, squeezed between two other high school girls in the top bunk, and waited for someone else to answer first. Our room for the weekend retreat was only wide enough for a row of bunk beds on each side and a walkway down the middle. It was our second night at Breakaway Lodge on the Oregon Coast. Damp, sandy socks and windbreakers spilled out of duffle bags, creating a continuous pile of laundry ready to go home. All of the girls from our West Seattle group squeezed together on the top bunks so we could see each other for our “cabin time” talk.

For the last six months, Michelle and Gretchen, two women in their twenties, offered fun in the midst of my fourteen-year-old hormonal mood swings and lack of transportation. They took me to high school football games and planned pizza nights. They were volunteers with a group called Young Life. Jolene, a junior and a teacher’s assistant in my freshman health class, invited a group of my freshmen friends to one of Young Life’s Monday night clubs. “You have so much fun, you don’t even need to drink,” Jolene told
us when the teacher was out of the room. I figured that was good since I was a rule follower. That night, I walked to meet Jolene in my high school’s parking lot and climbed into Gretchen’s car for a scavenger hunt.

Michelle, a newlywed attorney, brought the courtroom shock factor into every conversation by inserting “always” and “never” statements when talking about life. “Never have sex before you’re married.” “Always read your Bible in the morning.” At twenty-eight, she was a legit grown-up who I suspected used this language of extremes to get high schoolers riled up and talking too. Talking about boys and sex, drinking and Jesus.

Gretchen was all bones and big eyes that peered out from her dark hair. Having graduated from college only a few months before we met, she spent her sparse extra dollars from her first teaching job to take me to the movies. Michelle pushed and Gretchen explained.

They told me about Jesus, how he was God in human form, and that’s why we celebrate his birth at Christmas. And the most shocking part—what the cross was all about. How he was nailed to it so I could be reconciled with God, so we all could. I had no idea there was a purpose behind his death and asked lots of questions. I’d spent my childhood walking through my fair share of musty European cathedrals. I’d seen many a crucifix with blood dripping from Jesus’s thorn-pierced brow, but I had no inkling that act was for humanity’s recovery from our separation from our Maker.

What appealed most about Jesus was his consistent pursuit of me. He knew me before I was born, and hadn’t left since. At least that’s what Michelle and Gretchen said. And I was learning love is a choice. My mother’s choices were a contrast to my father’s, and Jesus’s love and death were all wrapped up in choice. It was a relief to know I at least had a heavenly Father who wouldn’t abandon me.

The visits with my Catalan father—my “sperm donor,” as my angst-filled teenage self began referring to him—were sporadic. As I look back now as a mother, our reunions remind me of that
peculiar trait of childbirth: just enough time would go by between visits that I would forget how painful they could be and I would decide to try again. Unlike with childbirth, I didn’t get to take a sweet package of unconditional love home with me.

About every six months I would get a letter in the mail with familiar handwriting and foreign stamps. Sometimes it would be an art book. A book about him with nothing more than a “
De tu padre
”—“From your father”—scrawled in the cover with the same distinct handwriting from the envelope.

The phone calls were even less frequent. My initial “Hello?” was always followed with a pause long enough to indicate the thousands of miles our voices were required to travel to reach each other. My heart stopped whenever I’d hear a long pause after I answered. On the rare occasion it was actually him and not a nervous boy calling, he would start the conversation with a proclamation: “Alexandra. It is your father.” That statement, said with such confidence, became more irritating every year. I knew what a father was supposed to do. Calling once a year was not it.

Every couple of years he would offer to pay for the pricey plane ticket for me to fly over the ocean to see him. And I would go, hopeful that this would be the time that I would be captivating enough to grab hold of him and shake him out of his absence. I would return ready to receive more letters and phone calls. And I waited in silence. Jesus had to be better than what I already had.

A few weeks before Christmas of my freshman year of high school, Gretchen took me to a Christian bookstore and bought me a Bible. I walked through the bookstore like it was another museum or cultural showcase. She picked out a student Bible with added excerpts about how the stories applied to teenage life. “The Bible is divided into books. Each book has a name and is broken into chapters and verses,” she explained as she flipped through pages.
Suddenly this Bible language of names and numbers I’d heard in the past had meaning. Clips of Scripture I’d heard referenced had a context. Christmas and Easter had a purpose. I’d known Santa and the Easter Bunny were make-believe for a long time. I’d just never understood that the real meaning behind the holidays had to do with God among us and the history of the world. The question now was,
Is it all for real?

For the most part, I was on board with it. I was open to hearing that God loved me. That Jesus loved me. Maybe because I had one parent who devoted herself to me and told me how special I was, it made it easier to believe I was lovable. And it wasn’t a stretch to see humanity needed a Savior. I’d seen the world; there was lots of pain. My own heart ached of things not being right. It made sense that God needed to intervene for all of our sakes.

So believing there was a God and he loved me was the easy part. But I had lots of questions about Jesus. Fully human and fully divine—how does that work? And is there really a heaven and a hell? Why are some people in and some out? What about my mom? She certainly was not talking about Jesus.

And what about all the rules? No sex before marriage? Does that mean I shouldn’t have been conceived? My existence was a mistake? And there seemed to be a lot of nos related to believing in Jesus. I wanted to say I believed who he was, but did that mean I had to go along with everything else?

It’s not that I had clear opinions about many of those hot-button issues, but I associated them with people I saw in downtown Seattle holding up posters that said “Repent Now.” Yet based on what I was hearing from Gretchen and Michelle, Jesus was about so much more than a few rules.

Gretchen arranged her drop-offs after our Young Life meetings on Monday nights so my house on Olga Street would be her last stop. She’d turn her car ignition off, and we’d sit in the dark and dive into my questions. What is with the Trinity? If God loves us
all, what’s the need for Jesus? What about people in remote places of the world who have never heard of him?

But really, even with all the questions, I felt pursued by God. The idea of God, Jesus, grace—I’d never had it explained to me before, and I was drawn to it. I wanted to believe. The psalmist writes, “Should I wander off like a lost sheep—seek me! I’ll recognize the sound of your voice.”
[1]
I hadn’t known I was lost until I was found; I recognized Jesus’s voice calling me.

At the core of all my anxiety, all those questions, was my mom. By accepting these ideas, by accepting Jesus, was I rejecting her? The woman who gave me everything. I often couldn’t see where she ended and I began. I think she was grateful for the pizza parties and movie nights that these Christian ladies invited me to be part of; they offered adult supervision and sober drivers. She didn’t have to worry about the activity or who was behind the wheel, and they gave her, a single mom, a few nights off a week. But what did she think about all of this God talk I came home with? When I asked her, she simply answered, “It’s not for me.” No more discussion, and I was worried about what that meant for her. For us. She was not just my mother; she was my nuclear family in its totality. She was half of me. I was half of her. That kind of bond makes for difficult separation.

Back in the cabin I asked questions like, “What about all those things? All those rules? Those judgments?” not realizing that for centuries theologians had been struggling with all these same questions. That many of the smartest people in history researched and pondered and debated issues of faith without conclusive answers.

“Pray that God will fill in the gaps,” Michelle said. An uncommonly open answer for a woman who tended toward black and white. “Faith is believing when you still have questions.”

So I started praying. I prayed God would make clear what I needed to know and I’d be okay with the unanswered questions that were left.

Many people can point to a place and time where they said, “Yes, Lord, I know I need you, I was created to be in a relationship with you. I’m not cutting it on my own.” I don’t have that definite point in time. I might have believed he was who he said he was, but the list of don’ts that appeared so judgmental stopped me from crossing the line. It took two years of wrestling those doubts before I stopped fighting and prayed, “Jesus, I believe in you more than I don’t believe.”