Bio dad died in 1985, which would have made him 45. I was 20 at the time, but, of course, didn't know. Until last week. Some of you might think I'm mad not knowing, but, truth be told, I'm only sad at the dying part. My new sisters and I have been emailing back and forth, trying to forge bonds and all that. It is, with the sexual elements completely removed you perverts, like having a new girlfriend, squared. What I mean is, we email back and forth, cautiously offering up parts of our personality, all the while wondering if the other person will ever email back again. I try to email them both equally, because I don't know if one will be jealous. If I don't hear from one for a couple of days, I wonder if I emailed something that annoyed them. They knew the bio father longer (though he had divorced their mom, as well, and they only saw him once a year until they were 10 or so and he died), so they feed me little bits of info or pictures or whatnot.
For example, one emailed this heartfelt passage (edited to protect the innocent):
I was surprised but glad that you contacted F. As I think she told you, we have been back and forth about trying to contact you. As it turned out, we would have had a problem since the last information we had indicated you lived in/around <<town I was born>>. Or at least that was where you were born. And if you had waited to call, F. may have very well changed the phone into her married name and you might never have been able to contact us. I think we discovered the possibility of your existence when our grandmother passed away in May '94. Actually a couple of weeks ago, I emailed a lady that was friends with our father and actually wanted to marry him when he died. She and I have corresponded for many years, and have never actually met. I asked her if she knew about any other children that our father would have and she said that she knew about you but didn't really know many details. She said that if we ever contacted you, she has a letter where our father tried to find you. Since you've contacted us, F. spoke to our mother and she said that our father used to carry your birth certificate around in his wallet and would get depressed on your birthday. She also said that she thought he had hired a private detective and tracked you down once, and he hid behind a tree and just watched you. She was fuzzy on when that would have occurred, but thought you would have been about 5 or so. I hope this news is not hurtful, but I think if it were the other way around, I would want to know that my father missed me.
See, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
That's a sad bit of real. What's sad is not that he didn't contact me. That's actually good. My family was pretty disfunctional for a while and I think his popping back up would have really effed things up. When I was a kid I never had a desire to hunt him down and I never though I would be better off with him instead of my (adopted) dad. All in all, the no contact thing worked out fine.
As for the heartbreaking, he was not a very good guy from what I have gathered (my mom, their mom). I'm not saying that anyone deserves to be tortured with the thought of the son they never had, but, since I'm kind of a golden rule/Darwinist/bastard myself, I'd have to say if he was a nicer guy, he would have ended up raising me himself and would still be married to my mom.
The part that does actually make me sad, then, is that he's dead. I'm in a really good place right now with family and knowing myself and all that stuff, and coming back into my life at this point would be okay. We'd hang out a little, I'd ask him any of the things that were bugging me, we'd see if he'd redeemed his bastardly ways and I'd get to know him as a grown-up. Without fucking up my relationship with my mom and dad.
Plus, as might have already ran though your head, 45 years old is a fuck young age to die. Probably of the three or so people that read this, 45 is your life over again. As long as you've been alive, times two. I remember when I was 20. Forty-five was in that block of age that went from about mid-30s to 60s or so; then there was old, which was 70s and 80s. But, as everyone older around you has said: It ain't that old. Because, as everyone older around you has said, you don't feel any older when you're 45, that you do when you're 25. It's the way you're treated by the 25 year olds that make you old. That and the grey hair.
Having new sisters is draining, but good. Having dead new biological father, not as much good, still about as draining.
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