Yet for 20 years I didn’t see my father or know what he looked like. And my mother never received a penny in child support. My mother and my father met in high school. After an intense relationship, she moved away with her family. A few months after she left, she told my father she was pregnant. When I was 10, my mother wanted to send me to Florida to meet my father. He demanded a blood test. Insulted and hurt, she hung up and never spoke to him again. The state of New Jersey required her to sue for child support when she applied for welfare. My mother says she got an order for a token amount, but my father was a penniless college student at the time, and the state never pursued him. My mother often thought about “going after him”’ but never did. She couldn’t afford a lawyer, didn’t think she could win and, she says, she didn’t want to hurt me.
Even though he was absent I grew up in my father’s shadow. My mother told me his name, his occupation, his alma mater and how every time she looked at me, she saw him. But we were very different. While we were on welfare, he was climbing the corporate ladder to become a successful attorney. While we lived in a run-down house with relatives, he lived in a big house with his wife and three daughters. While I had no male role models until I went to an all-boys school on scholarship, he was president of a local NAACP chapter, a role model to boys he hardly know. I never knew how affluent he was. And I never thought I cared. I never connected poverty and my absentee father.
I never thought I would meet him. Then my mother called one day while she was vacationing in Florida. In a joyous tone, she told me she had visited my father’s mother. My grandmother had given her a picture of my father in his judge’s robes. I was angry. All the feelings I had repressed for 20 years came flooding back I decided that confronting the unknown was the best therapy. I called my grandmother. She gave me his number. In a cold, scientific voice I told him I wanted to resolve the issue of his paternity. He asked for a test. I agreed.
Weeks later a handsome professional couple walked into the lobby of the Center for Blood Research. After a cordial greeting, pained small talk and a tortured silence, my father asked me to step outside. On the sidewalk in front of the building, in a tone of admirable dignity, he told me that he and my mother had been very much in love as teenagers and that whatever the results of this test today, I should feel free to call on him when I needed a man’s advice. I felt like one of the Bowery Boys being counseled by Father Flanagan. Several months later we received the results. These things don’t come out 100 percent positive, because they test genes and two men-say, twins-could have identical genes. But it was 99.78 percent probable that this man was my father. And he didn’t have a twin.
Over the next two years, my father and I tried to establish a relationship. After the first year, it was clear that I was making most of the telephone calls. I even visited his hometown several times. When I did, I stayed with my grandmother. He never got around to visiting me.
When I first called him that summer night, I thought I had nothing to lose. But I was wrong. Once I found him I wanted to know who he was and where I came from. Most of all I wanted to know how he could stand a child of his wandering around somewhere in the world and not know if it was sick or well or starving. I realized that the gravity of the void he had left in my life had influenced my relationships and my perspectives, like an uncharted planet affects the bodies around it. Knowing he knew where I was and didn’t care had led me to trust friends more than family, to praise the strength and loyalty of women more than men and to promise myself that I would be a better father. After we met, despite my anger, I still wanted his approval and his admiration. But I never felt like I had it. Our relationship is hardly more developed today than it was the day we met.
The nagging question for those of us abandoned by our fathers - however good their reasons - is “How could you?” My father has never given me a satisfactory answer. When I compared him to my brother, who will have to take financial responsibility for his illegitimate daughter or face jail under New Jersey law, he said I could not compare him to some little boy in the ghetto who rejects responsibility. The truth is I don’t compare my father to my brother, or other deadbeat dads. I want to think his reasons for not supporting me are better than theirs. He called me two weeks in a row this month. I felt lucky, even grateful. Really. I know I have every reason to be angry and bitter for what he has not given me. But even now, and maybe forever, what I really want is a father.
