Finding Dad: From "Love Child" to Daughter (2 page)

  
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Picket Fence Imposters

Seeing my biological father on TV touched the vulnerable place deep down inside that I tried to live above. My bubbly smile hid the shaky part of my center that ached for stability. I couldn’t help but wonder if my big powerful father, who’d just shown up on TV, could rescue me and make me feel safe.

For as long as I could remember, the feeling of loss was ever-present, and got worse when I worried. I had learned to build up my armor, but that fearful place never let me fully exhale because I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. From the moment I landed on earth, my life was rocky.

It wasn’t Mom’s fault; she tried, but it was just so hard. She worked full time to keep us in our home, stayed up at night with me, all while trying to fight my father in court. He refused to acknowledge the possibility I was his, even though Mom swore I was, and tests showed we had the same blood type. A judge had to issue a bench warrant just to get him to show up in court. The stress was too much and Mom ended up in the hospital for exhaustion. For two months, she stayed at the hospital every night, though they let her come home during the day to see me. When the doctors released her, she had to give up her job as a star salesperson at IBM, and we moved in with Grandma and Grandpa so they could help take care of me.

Grandma and Mom didn’t always get along, but I got along with her beautifully. The extra attention felt luxurious. While Mom rested, Grandma cooked my favorite meal of Mac ‘n’ Cheese. Grandpa was wonderful and loved feeding me all the grapes my stomach could possibly hold. “More gips, Pow Pow,” I squealed from my high chair while holding out my tiny hands.

Our special relationship was cut short when Grandpa, only a young fifty-nine, died suddenly from a bizarre infection. I was only two years old, and sadly can’t remember his legendary hugs. Mom was devastated. Even though I was only a toddler, he had been the only man in my life, and I think his sudden passing was another shockwave that created small cracks in my foundation.

A few months later, Mom gave up her fight with my father and settled for $35,000, which she used to buy a little house so we could start a new life together, just the two of us. I loved having her all to myself, but it was different for her—she wanted and needed more.

When I was three, Mom married John Hewes so she could have a partner and I could have a father. He already had two grown children, but promised Mom he would adopt me and treat me as his own—which meant taking his last name. I know Mom was trying to do the right thing for us, but I didn’t like it and refused to get happy about their wedding. This was a huge change for me, and it all happened too fast for my young mind to process. Now I had to share her, and I wasn’t ready for that.

On the day of their wedding, Mom dressed me up to be the flower girl, but I refused to walk down the aisle. I stood there clutching Mom’s gown and begging her to walk with me. I was terrified of losing her. Seeing no other choice, she pried my tiny fingers off of her, and I made the walk down the aisle of the church, trying not to cry. During our Father-Daughter dance, I accidentally peed on John, splattering my white ankle socks and Mary Jane shoes. It was my three-year-old way of saying “I don’t like this, or you!”

Everyone was so busy celebrating, I had to go by myself to the bathroom to clean myself up, and I couldn’t help but feel forgotten. It was a feeling I would become more familiar with as Mom tried to balance her life as a mom and new wife. They left on their honeymoon to Mexico, and I wondered if I would still be the most important thing in her life.

After the wedding, Mom was determined to create the picket fence life in our nice colonial home in Upper Arlington, a bucolic suburb of Columbus. She didn’t have to work, so she stayed home, honing her interior design skills by decorating our house in seafoam green and peach, which was all the rage in the 70s. I didn’t want to call John “Dad,” but Mom said I had to since he had adopted me. To this day, I can’t get his name off my birth certificate because of some whack adoption laws that make everything permanent, when it shouldn’t be.

A couple years later we moved to a nice four bedroom home in Troy, Michigan. Mom decided that staying at home just wasn’t for her, so she went back to work. I secretly wished she could be happy making me cookies, like my friends’ moms.

In the meantime, John tried to do all the right things like coaching my soccer team and cutting down Christmas trees, but he was an alcoholic, and more often than not he embarrassed me. I didn’t want him to be part of my life. Sometimes he would go on a drinking binge and vanish for a few days. I hated the smell of his breath when he came home to say he was sorry and try to read me a bedtime story. He didn’t act at all like my friends’ fathers, and there were so many times I wished he would stay gone. I was only about seven at the time, but I remember always making sure he got the mismatched silverware and the chipped plate when I set the table. Why couldn’t he just disappear?

We may have tried to look like the perfect family with all the right window dressings, but behind the curtains Mom and John fought a lot. One time, it happened in front of my good friend, Jennifer. We were in the third grade and playing in the family room when I heard the screaming start. It got so bad, Mom threw a jar of molasses at him, and the thick dark goo splattered all over the floor. We were playing in the other room when we heard the screams and sounds of shattering glass. It scared Jennifer to tears and she begged to go home. I was sure nothing like that happened in her perfect Mormon home. The searing shame burned inside me and made me want to throw things back at them. I didn’t because I didn’t want to look any worse than we already did. More than anything, I desperately wanted to look “normal,” and this was anything but a
Leave It to Beaver
moment. Mom tried to convince Jennifer they were just acting out a play so she wouldn’t want to call her mom. It didn’t work, and from then on I always played at her house.

But the worst humiliation was when John hit the school bus while driving drunk. I was nine years old and thought I would die of embarrassment if anyone found out. I couldn’t hide and, for some unearthly reason, Mom brought me to court to witness the judge ordering him to stay in jail for the night. I was so ashamed and wished they would keep him locked up. I would rather not have a dad at all than have one whose name ended up in the police blotter.

Mom tried to help him through rehab, and signed herself up for Al-Anon meetings so she could learn not be so co-dependent and heal her “adult-child.” She forced me go to Alateen, even though I wasn’t even ten years old yet, just to make sure I could “recover,” too. Mom always worried about how things I’d witnessed would impact me later in life, and insisted I get preemptive help. I hated having to talk about my feelings to strangers, and just wanted it all to be over.

When they finally got a legal separation, I was thrilled. Life with John had been filled with unpredictable tension and arguments, and more than anything I wanted a
normal
family life. It was a word I thought about a lot as a child.

When I was in the fifth grade, they finally got divorced and after about a year, John Hewes vanished and quit paying the court-ordered child support. Though we had been abandoned for the second time, I told myself we were better off without him. But I knew Mom was terribly upset he wasn’t fulfilling his obligation to support us.

It seems my dislike for John wasn’t misplaced, since he was also the reason I never saw a photograph of my real father. Mom had saved pictures and newspaper clippings from his various accomplishments to give me once I got older and asked about my biological father. John got drunk one night and burned everything in the box, saying I didn’t need to know any of that, since he had adopted me and was my only father now. Mom said John was jealous that my real father was so successful and thought he was a “dirty Jew.”

With John gone, my mom was wearing even more hats, and it seemed she was coming unglued. She was constantly busy trying to grow her interior design business, heal her wounds with therapy, and raise me alone. It was too much for her to handle by herself. I thought having John gone meant I’d have more time with her, but she was busy trying to support us, so I saw a lot less of her. I was too young to understand the stress she was going through. All I knew was that I missed cuddling up for movie nights and having her there after I came home from school.

My ten-year-old self started to crack under the stress. I was lonely and always angry. Between my issues and Mom’s pressure of supporting us, raising me alone, and going through a divorce, we began fighting a lot. I’d be furious if she was late to pick me up and criticize her for not doing things like all the stay-at-home moms. I was unfair to her, yet I blamed her for anything that was wrong in my life. I know now the chronic ache of abandonment I felt was partly the fault of a biological father who wouldn’t claim me as his own—but back then, I looked to Mom to make it all work.

Adding to my stress was that I was being bullied at school. She was the blonde, popular fifth grader who could make or break my day. If she liked me, I was golden. If she decided I was ugly or dumb, or simply not good enough to play with her, she and the other girls would hit me with jump ropes. I would do anything to make her like me, and even invited her on a getaway with Mom. Looking back, I can barely believe that I took my bully on vacation with me!—but between not having a father, the divorce, a distracted mother, and the bullying, my self worth was disappearing. My already weak foundation crumbed, and coping meant doing anything to make someone approve of me because I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to everything that was happening in my young world. My rage was always right under my skin, until it finally boiled over like a tea pot on a roaring flame.

One day, after a typical fight with Mom, I finally blew. I ran upstairs to the bathroom and took my mother’s pills she used to manage depression. I found the amber colored prescription bottle in her medicine cabinet and took it to my bathroom. The bottle looked about half full, and I wasn’t sure how many it would take to have an effect, so I decided to pop thirteen. I didn’t really want to die, but I was dying for attention. I swallowed them one by one, quickly gulping water from the sink to wash them down. When I was done, I angrily stomped downstairs and announced, “I took your pills.”

“You did what?” she screamed.

“Yep, thirteen of them. Now you won’t have to worry about being there for me.”

It was an incredibly cruel thing to say, especially to a woman whose heart had already been broken so many times.

The truth was I was hurting and I wanted her to magically fix my broken world. I needed her to really
see
me, to feel like I mattered, to have my hurts validated, rather than just be pushed to the side because life moved at lightning speed.

It was a desperate cry for help, and it worked. Mom’s face went pasty white as she ditched her work files and frantically called Poison Control, where the operator told her to get me syrup of Ipecac. She threw me in the car and sped to the pharmacy down the street. When we got home, I remember feeling happy to have her doting hands on me as she forced me to swallow the thick, bitter syrup. We sat together on the cold bathroom floor as I started throwing up, but I couldn’t stay awake. The pills had flooded my tiny blood stream, and I was going in and out of unconsciousness.

I have no memory of Mom racing me to the hospital, or the doctors pumping my stomach. They told her that Poison Control had given her the wrong advice, and that she should have rushed me to the ER. The time at home with the Ipecac could very likely have cost me my life. But despite the doctors’ fears, I managed to pull through and made a full recovery after a week in intensive care. They let me go home as long as I enrolled in counseling.

As a mother today, I can’t even imagine how paralyzing the fear must have been for my mom to know her child tried to kill herself—and almost succeeded—due to bad advice. Moreover, I can’t believe I did that to her.

I did the obligatory ten sessions, but didn’t want to go after that because it didn’t feel normal. I wasn’t in therapy long enough to trace back my father’s rejection as the reason for this deep void dwelling inside of me. I never told anyone that I had a biological father I’d never met because I was ashamed. Everyone has a father, right? So why didn’t I? Why
couldn’t
I?

After everything that had happened, I couldn’t face returning to school—to the kids, the teachers, my bully—since everyone knew what I’d done. We needed a fresh start.

Mom put the house on the market and we moved to Florida, where she took a temporary design project so we could begin again. Mom decided the best place to go was back to Columbus where most of Mom’s family still lived. This would allow her time to rebuild her business and provide a stable home. The best part was that I could grow up near my cousins.

My Aunt Kathy and Uncle Gary were as American as apple pie, and took me in so I could get settled in school while Mom wrapped up her affairs. I was so excited to live with my cousins, Danielle and Brian, who were near my age and the closest thing I had to siblings. Between Aunt Kathy’s legendary home cooked meals and Uncle Gary’s boat rides on the weekend and love of Ohio State football, I thrived in the warmth of their home, and didn’t mind that it was taking Mom a longer than expected to come get me and find a house. While we waited for Mom to come, Aunt Kathy enrolled me in school for the last few months of fifth grade and took me shopping for school clothes. But Mom never came.

She’d met a new man and was going to be engaged. She was so sorry about the change in plans, but it all happened so fast. Aunt Kathy had opened her heart and home to make a place for me, and truth was that I loved it. Now, I felt like the carpet had been pulled out from underneath my feet.

Mom had no clue. She thought we should be happy for her, but I could tell Aunt Kathy was furious, and so was I. So much for stability. Mom finally came to Ohio and moved me back home to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, to a rental house near her fiancé. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, since he was very wealthy and wanted us to move in with him and his children. In the meantime, Mom said I might as well start sixth grade at my new forever school.