Dear Daddy

 Dear Daddy,

    For many years you existed, for me, only in my mind. I understood the rules of biology so I knew you had to BE...somewhere, out there in the ether, floating around like a balloon on a string, tied to something I couldn't see.

    I would miss you. Wish for your presence, your appearance in my life. I wanted you save me, to be my knight in shining armor. Never once did I consider that you might be a bad man, lowly and foul. If anything, I was the bad one. Tainted, stained. At the same time I wanted you, I knew I didn't deserve you.

    It's hard to believe that you're worthy of love when you grew up like I did. Mother is your world. She's God. But instead of Gaia, my mother was Kali. A destroyer grown from anger but never did she slay any demons, only created them. Maybe she was Gaia, after all.

    She hurt me, in all the ways a parent can hurt a child. And I would think of you then, and feel ashamed. I knew why you never came. I was bad. Parents don't want bad kids. Daddy's don't want fat, ugly, stupid little girls who should have been aborted.

    But still I wished for you. I wanted to sit in your lap. I wanted to hold your hand. I wanted you to gather me up in your arms and hold me so tight I couldn't breathe. I wanted to sing you songs and recite the poems I wrote for you. I wanted you to tuck me in at night and protect me from the monsters under my bed. I wanted you to think I was smart and pretty.

    You were always on my mind, in my heart. When I was eight, I learned your name. Kim. She said you were short and had red hair. She told me a very brief story of how she met you and how I came to be. I don't know why she finally chose to tell me anything at all, but she made sure to convey the knowledge that I was the result of a one night stand and that you knew about me and didn't care. She didn't tell me that I was the spitting image of you. Maybe she had forgotten your face by then. The memory burned away by alcohol and drugs.

    It didn't matter to me. So many secrets in my family. I knew they were there. I could feel them all around me, pushing in on me, invisible to the eye but plain as day in the pain they caused. But now you weren't a secret anymore. Not entirely. I knew your name

    And I would think of you. My daddy Kim. I wondered what you must be like. What did your voice sound like? Were you ugly like me? Did I have any brothers and sisters? I never blamed you for not being there. Fathers left. It was a fact of life. My brother's father left. My cousin's father left. My friends father's left. It wasn't something I couldn't forgive in a heartbeat. I thought about you all the time, carving out a space in my heart for you, loving you without knowing you.

    But as I got older, I started to doubt her story. As my mother sank deeper into alcoholism and the abuse worsened, I began to wonder if what she'd told me was even close to the truth. Nobody believed her story. Not her mother, her sister, her best friends. None of them had ever heard the story she told me. She never spoke of you to anyone but me, and just that one time. After that, there were no more details. It was like that special night had never happened.

    As I grew older, grew up, I slowly let you go. I knew I would never be able to find you. And I knew that even if I did find you, you'd most likely be disappointed in me, if you even wanted to know me at all. I contacted various people over the years, here and there, when the mood would strike. Eventually, I crossed all the names off my list of people who knew my mother around the time I was born. Again, no one had any knowledge of you. I came to terms with the fact that I would never meet you. I accepted what, to me, felt like a profound loss.

    I was married with kids by then. I was so grateful to my husband for not leaving us that I let him get away with doing and saying terrible things to me. I allowed him to diminish me. Invalidate me. Gaslight me. Talk to me crazy. Deprive me of my sanity. I allowed all of it because I thought he was a good man because he stayed. I couldn't see him as destructive because he didn't follow the narrative in my mind of the man who leaves. Well, he did leave eventually. That's when I finally started waking up from my long marital nightmare.

    By then, though, I had found you. Through the wonders of technology and science. A DNA test. And to my surprise, you were indeed the man my mother had named as my father. I didn't have any expectations of you. Hopes, but no expectations. In fact, I did my best to prepare for the worst possible outcome- that you wouldn't even speak to me or in any way acknowledge my existence. But you did. 

    I can't say that all of your answers to my questions were completely satisfactory, but they sufficed. It was difficult to receive confirmation that you knew of my existence but chose to never seek me out. But I could understand why you didn't. It's not a choice I would have made but I understood how you could come to make such a choice. I was just grateful that you were willing to speak with me and also to allow me a small place in your life and your family's life. It's a privilege I don't take lightly.

    You wrote me beautiful letters, kind and funny letters. You wrote letters to my children. You sent us gifts at Christmas. I have photos of us together from our one lovely, awkward meet. That's so much more than I ever got from my mom. She never wrote me anything that wasn't filled with hate. She never once gave me a gift in my whole life. I have NEVER in my life laid eyes on a picture of she and I together because such a picture never existed. 

    Because of our mutual financial and health situations, and the state of the world, I don't know if I'll ever get to see you again. If I don't, I just want you to know that whatever it was I needed from you, emotionally, that you gave it to me. Your kind words, the effort you made at being a father to me even at this late stage, is priceless to me. It means the world to me, and I will always be grateful to you for that.

I love you Dad.