Monday, 06 April 2009

• Confessions of a Bastard Child

  Featured_Grownups and the new topic of "change" compelled me to bite the bullet and type out a post that has floated around in my head for a while. Here goes...

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  My mouth hung agape as I read the words penned from my biological father to my mother. It was a letter he'd written her from jail. What he was there for, I still don't know. I don't think I want to either.

  The picture of my father that his family painted for me had always been on the romantic side. He loved my mother. He loved nature. He would have been ga-ga over me. He was there to help no matter how difficult the task was. He was a fairy tale prince sticking out his finger only to have a baby bird hop on and listen to this swan song.

  My mother never really spoke of him much. As a matter of fact, she couldn't even tell me about him when it was time to let me in on the family secret: I was a stepchild to "Daddy." I was a bastard child fitting the dictionary definition to the -nth degree--a child born without a father. Yep. That was me. (Not that Daddy broke it to me that harshly at all.)

  As a matter of fact, until he told me otherwise, I didn't know I wasn't his biological child. Sure, I was the only blonde child in a family full of black hair. It happens, right? That whole recessive gene thing.

  And so Daddy broke the news to me when I realized that I had more sets of grandparents than the rest of my friends did. (Yes, it took me until I was about eleven to figure that out. I never have been the most observant of persons--especially in the common sense arena.) When Daddy told me about this man who was my biological father, he just said that Mom loved him before she and Daddy met. He said it was still hard to talk about for Mom. And all the while she stood in the door of their bedroom crying.

  My memory shot back to the day I found out about this man, Gary (my biological father) when I found the letter he wrote Mom--"Gary's Letter from Jail" as I have since dubbed it.

  I suppose I could also just call it "the letter that cemented in my mind the fact that my mother and I received a blessing in disguise the night he died."

  They had been engaged, you know. Gary and my mom. She was too young for that mess. Only sixteen. 

  Sixteen and engaged to a man who, in the aforementioned letter, warned her that if he found out she even spoke to another man while he was "away,"  he would kick the "shit" out of her and the "motherfucker" she was talking to or dating. Now, I know the Navy could make a man rough, but what I read in that letter crossed from rough to abusive from abusive to life-threatening. And, of course, irony of ironies, he ended the letter with a few sentences about his undying love for her.

  He loved my mother. Tell me another one, and--please--hit me with another shot first.

  I asked Daddy about the letter once. He just said that he knew about it. He didn't say much more. He did add that mom kept quite a few mementos for when she felt like we could talk about that time in her life.

  We still haven't done so, and I don't mind.

  A woman's soul is a deep well of secrets--secrets about her past, secrets about her thoughts, secrets about her plans. My mother's may be the deepest well I know--full of secret pains. At least, I imagine it to be so.

  And mine? Mine is a deep well of secret thoughts. Some are secret. I told my grandmother (Mom's mom) once about the letter. She didn't know about it, but she wasn't surprised when I told her what was in it. She said something to me that reverberates in my ears and mind still: My "mother won out in the end because Gary would've never made her a husband. She'd have been a bitter divorcee."

  Grandma was right. My mom did win out. So did I.

  The man I call "Daddy" loves my mother with an unselfish and undying love. He loves me as he loves his two sons (and secretly, he may even favor me by merit of my gender). Finding that letter saved me in a way. It saved me from my misperceptions. I no longer wonder what might have been if Gary had never died. I am grateful--eternally--for what is: for the true love my mother found, for the father I have, for the raising I received, for two baby brothers who hesitate to say I am their half-sister. For love. For family. For sparing.

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