My parent’s marriage ended, according to some accounts (namely my mother’s) at my first birthday party when my dad declared he was gay. He claims that didn’t end the marriage, that the fact that my mother rejected his idea for an open marriage that ended the marriage. This disparity tells a lot about my family. But that is just it—stories. There is always a his side and a her side. And I suppose this is my side.
While I would like to say my parents worked past their differences, and I grew up loved and supported in two homes, that the miracle of divorce multiplies the love instead of dividing it, but this was the seventies and such multiplication was still a new theory. Instead, my parents fought about things like money for shoes. Then my mom remarried, and the whole ball game changed. Forms were issued that traded debt relief for me. If my dad didn’t pay, he couldn’t see me. Ever. He agreed. The story I’m told is that he believed it would be best for me if my mom was happy.
I didn’t see my dad but for a brief period in my late teens when I got to know him and then cut all ties. I wasn’t ready for all the pressures of being my father’s daughter coupled with a new large extended family. So like father, like daughter. Instead of paying up to the storm of a family, I walked away and didn’t look back until my daughter started asking why she didn’t have a grandpa.
My husband’s father passed away right before we met. My stepfather, the man I called daddy of all the life, I remembered refused to speak to me, to see him, to have me at the home I grew up in when he was there because I married a man who had brown skin and a different country on his passport. Our daughter, aged three, wondered why she didn’t have a grandpa. I too wondered. And then I made a few calls.
