#estrangedfather

My father's presence in my childhood was very spotty. He was there for a few months, but then he was gone for longer, he'd come back, and continue doing this in-and-out of my life for several years and make his final exit when I was 7 or 8. He'd call every few years, maybe send a card with the wrong age on it, and one time he even got me a DS he sent me from FL. But he never moved home, he never made an effort to see us, and he'd make promises he never kept. 

A few years ago when I was 18, my dad contacted me on facebook, and i was very hesitant, and fearful to continue contact with him for several reasons. 

1. I didn't know this man, he was a vague, but mostly pleasant, memory from my childhood. Albeit he and my mother were always in screaming matches, and being violent, he was never particularly awful to my brother or I unless we had been bad. 

2. My mother and entire family loathes his very existence because of past wrongs that I was still too young yet to comprehend. To the point there "just like your father" was a vile insult enough to make me sob because I knew how much my mother hated him. Mom had threatened us many-a-time to disown us if we ever got into contact with him. 

3. I was afraid he'd want to pick back up where he left off, have me call him dad, even come for a visit, which I was most terrified of because I know if I did I'd not be allowed to come back home. 

So I ignored his message and over several months he'd send me a few others in which case I decided it was the internet, my mom barely knew how to play a computer... how would she ever find out? 

So I started a small connection with him, I made it a point to call him Dennis, not dad, or father or anything. And he never had a qualm with it. 

Well our connection was spotty, here and there over several years (I'm 21 now) and I felt more at ease in being in contact with him. He really seems to have settled down in his old age and is married in Tennessee.

Last year, in june, my dad came over to NC where I am currently living with my boyfriend for a visit. And it was a very nervous thing for me because the first thing he did was wrap me in a big hug and almost cry and i just kind of awkwardly patted his back like maybe nothing has happened in your life since you last saw me, but I had become a woman since I last saw him. I was by no means his little girl, nor did he have any right to take claim to those feelings for me. 

But despite everything, the weekend turned out okay, we ended up going to the beach and my dad bought my boyfriend and I dinner at a nice seafood restaurant and was very nice to me. He left on sunday and messages me now and again on facebook, mostly casual stuff. I call him Dad on occasion now, but mostly I try to avoid having to call him anything. 

My brother really hates my father, and I understand and feel for him, since he is a boy, and that fatherly role is important to them. I've always had a really large forgiving heart, so I've never really been able to hold a grudge at all. But my empathy extends to all walks of life so I understand the wound my brother bears on his heart for the absence my father left in his childhood. 

But my point of this whole thing, is my dad did not raise me. Biologically, he is my father, emotionally, he is the father-like figure from memories far faded, but he did not raise me. This fathers day, I had an inner fight with myself the week leading up to that sunday. 

Of COURSE, I would wish my mother a happy fathers day, I always did. She was mom and dad for a very long time. 

I wish my best friends dad, Chris, a happy fathers day because he filled the gaps my mom couldnt with a stable family atmosphere, camping trips, theme park visits, all kinds of knowledge and trivia that I learned from him, anything from computers, to forests, landmarks in our town, he used to take me and Alyssa out on his four wheeler and take us all around the woods. He'd tell us about the old pieces of rail road wall, and what they were for, the old steel mill, do donuts on the frozen "yucky lake" which was a drainage pit that they would use when the steel mill caught on fire. One memory stands out, and thats when we were buzzing through a snowy field and he stopped, because there was a herd of deer not 10 feet from us, including a huge buck. And we sat there, the sun getting ready to set, the stag's breath billowing from his nostrils as he took stock of us, and all three of us being amazed before we continued on our way. And I will never forget Chris's enthusiasm, which was enough to match our own. 

I learned alot from that man, and I love him dearly, he will always hold a place in my heart that a father usually does. Between him and my mother, I never truly lacked a father, except maybe by blood. 

And that brings me back to this fact; My father did not raise me. I felt it a betrayal to wish him a happy fathers day, when that day is reserved for men who were just that, fathers. He may have sired me, he may have been there briefly in my childhood, and he may even feel like a father in his own heart, but in mine, he is a blood relation. But that is all. I have empathy towards him, and it was solely for that fact that I even considered sending him those three words this June 15th, 2014, but empathy is not enough, for me, as it turns out.