My Father’s Daughter

Offspring of A Love Triangle Gone Wrong

’Because I didn’t want your father…I wanted him’…

I was still in the drunk phrase of a brain fog at the reality about it being my last year as a juvenile before officially being declared an adult at 18 when the letter from my biological father reached me.

I don’t remember finding my way to my mother’s bedroom where she was sitting on the edge of the bed staring straight towards the doorway when I walked in. I don’t remember what time of day it was or what she was doing at the time. When I asked her why she had lied to me and told me that my father hadn’t wanted me and had left me on the doorstep, she had calmly stated in her usual quiet, plainly blunt-speaking way, ‘Because I didn’t want your father’. In all those years, it had never occurred to me to ask her why my father had been taking care of me in the first place. Why had I not been living with her, the woman who had given birth to me. Well, now I knew. I tried to be angry. I tried to hate her; but couldn’t. She was my mother; you don’t hate the woman who is the reason you are on the planet.

As I grew older I understood why I didn’t hold on to my anger of her lying to me about my father. Not once, never in my life, did my mother ever utter a negative word about my father. In fact, she never spoke of him except when I questioned her about him when I was a child and when I received his letter before my 18th birthday.

It was addressed to me in a handwriting that was eerily familiar. It was from a foreign address from a name I had never heard of in our family circle. Reading the words in the letter seemed to numb my senses with every sentence; I remember thinking I should feel pain…where was the hurt? I couldn’t find or feel the emotions I needed to help me through this. There was nothing. I just sat there, frozen, gripping that letter as if it were a piece of skin that had been severed and I needed to put pressure on it to help it stop bleeding.

Suddenly, without warning, the feelings I had been searching for ripped through me as if I had been backhand slapped. I felt I was being physically flogged, stabbed and bludgeoned, and finally emotionally violated, as I came to the end of the letter where I blinked through a rush of tears at the words, “when can I see you” and “Love, your Father” signed at the end of it.

In my mind I kept going back to the words, “I’ve been searching for you and I have finally found you. It’s been a long time coming, but it was worth it”. Over and over, an endless loop. I couldn’t seem to stop hearing the words I kept repeating in my head. I had been wanted. My father wanted me.

I didn’t even realize I was crying until I noticed that my tears were distorting the ink on the pages of the letter. I don’t know how long I sat there as painful memories of my young life played back endlessly. I vividly remember the cruelty of an uncle whose constant sneer of disgust twisted his lips as he often reminded me that I was “another man’s leavings”. This mean-spirited bitter man (adult) would seize every opportunity to remind me (a child) that I was not his brother’s biological child. But somehow, that memory was now no longer the emotional bullet of hurt and emotional devastation it once was.

I had this letter that proved I was some man’s child, some man’s daughter. And, he wanted me. I was a child who was wanted.

I am My Father’s Daughter.