Pulling the Plug

I've been thinking about this for a while now ... I'm going to stop writing about the past in this blog. I hope to do updates on what is happening in the present and future, but the story of how we got here...

Well, the more I've written, the more I've started to feel that perhaps this is not stuff that I want to share -- even anonymously -- without first telling it directly to L__. If somehow she found this site and saw that I had publicly written about all of this for strangers to read before she herself had, I worry it would upset her and I just don't want to do anything that would endanger our developing relationship. It is the most important thing to me and I have to do what I can to build it.

So, thanks to anyone who read the story so far and has given me insight, advice or hope. I greatly appreciate it.

Hopefully as things move ahead, I can change the name from "Confessions of an Absentee Father" to "Revelations of An Involved Father".

Happy Holidays everyone!

To Blog Or Not To Blog

I know that blogs are supposed to be updated regularly, and I actually have a few postings in the works but don't feel they are ready yet to share.

But in all honesty, I'm starting to have funny feelings about the sharing of all this. The idea was to help me explore my feelings and best find my way back into L__'s life, but I don't want it to become ... I don't know ... exploitative? Is that even possible if I keep our anonymity?

Maybe it's just the stoic Midwestern values that were oh-so soundly instilled into me -- you know, the ones where you don't air your personal stuff in public. But if everyone followed that, there'd be almost no blogging done at all!

And I don't want to come across as "woe is me" nor do I want to constantly flog myself while wearing a hairshirt ... I just seem to figure things out better when I write them out. But I could do that in a journal, yes? Why do it in a public forum?

If this was just about me, I wouldn't worry about it all ... but it's about my daughter. And her mother. Even if this is all anonymous, is it fair to write about some of the most personal issues in these people's lives without their knowledge or consent?

How do other bloggers deal with these issues?

Post-Thanksgiving

Working on a new post that deals with meeting & going out with L__'s mother and it's taking longer than I thought. Will have it done early next week.

I had hoped to hear from L__ again during last Thanksgiving weekend; it's been three weeks since her last email. But didn't.

I wrote her on the Tuesday before, working to keep any sense of a request or expectation that she write me back or anything like that out of the email. I'm getting a lot of feedback from people who have dealt with these kind of experiences that I need to be loose and non-pushy. So that's what I did.

But it's hard.

It's obvious to me that there's a lot more going on than just her being busy with her college schedule, although I know that it is pretty intense. I'm sure a lot of feelings and emotions about finding me are involved right now ... as an adoptee friend of mine wrote me:

Before I met my birth mother I'd spent a lot of time online on what was basically a listserv for the adoption community so had heard many reunion stories as well as much discussion about the intense and often contradictory emotions experienced by folks on both sides. I don't doubt that L__ is experiencing some of those contradictory emotions right now -- joy at having finally found you, fear that you may not live up to the fantasies she no doubt had about whom her father might be, worry about how a reunion -- or even her search -- would make her mother feel. Plus maybe anger at you for not having been there. And maybe insecurity and self doubt as well. It's pretty fraught, and in the instance of reunion, at least, harder on the one who holds the fewest cards (in this instance, you). And there's the fact of her youth, though perhaps balanced a bit by her obvious intelligence.

The fact that she searched for you does say a lot. What it tells me is that she's always thought about you, wondered about you, wanted to know you. I mean, my god -- she found you!

But, imagine the shock. You spend your whole life wondering about this person and making up elaborate scenarios about who they might be and why they gave you up and all of a sudden you're confronted by reality. So in addition to wondering, well, is this person someone I can like or even love, you have to give up all of those fantasies you had when you were seven that maybe Dad was a Rockefeller or Martin Scorsese or Bill Clinton or Mick Jagger. Or someone who just by his presence could make all the hurt in your life go away. When you meet an actual person you have to say goodbye to those daydreams.

These are good things to know and think about. So I will continue to keep my presence in L__'s life by writing her emails -- but not inundating her with them -- that give her some info and insight into who I am, while also making sure I don't dump heavy or weighty issues that might overwhelm her at this point. I will work to just be something I have never been before:

Present.

Fathers, DNA and "Real" Parents

There was a very interesting article in the NY TIMES magazine last Sunday. Entitled "Who Knew I Was Not the Father?", it's about several issues -- among them, of course absentee fathers -- but also fathers who thought their children were theirs but then learned, via DNA testing, that they weren't.

The question the article keeps toying with is "what defines a real parent": DNA or presence? It goes on to explore the many different legal issues, which I won't want to get into here. What really interests me is the issue of how some men still feel like they are the child's father while others, once they discover they are not the biological father, leave and want nothing to do with the child any more.

First of all, I have to admit ... the question of whether or not I'm L__'s real father has crossed my mind more than once. I don't actually know for a fact that she really is my biological child. I'm not trying to cast any aspersions on her mother, C__; I am certainly not one who can throw stones about having multiple sex partners. The truth is simply that I only knew her for 4 or so weeks before she became pregnant. And during that period she took a trip to Las Vegas for a week. It was with her mother she said, but I didn't go with them or see them off at the airport.

Again, this is not to paint C__ in a negative light or to shift responsibility off of me; I'm simply being honest in saying what I know about the circumstances of the time. Do I know for a fact that L__ is my child? No.

Now, ask me what I believe.

I believe C__ was telling the truth.

I can only go on my instinct for evaluating people and, typically, I'm a pretty good judge of character. C__ seemed a straight-shooting kind of person who ... to the point she'd tell you eff off to your face if she didn't like what you were saying or doing.

So, yeah, I do believe L__ is my daughter. I suppose some day she and I may have to address the truth of this and get our DNA tested ... but it's really not high on my list of issues. And to be honest, at this point, I would be upset and disappointed to find out if she wasn't. Since the day I found out C__ was pregnant, L__ has been part of my life and psyche.

Yes, yes, I know -- some way to show it by not being there for her entire life! Okay, I deserve that. But what I mean is that she has become a part of who I am; I am the father -- and yes, an absent one -- of a daughter. I've absorbed her existence into my own even as I was not physically present. Friends and family have known about her since conception and one of the first things I told my wife when our dating started getting serious was that L__ was out there and may one day enter our lives. I wanted her to know this was a part of who I am.

So in my mind, my life, she is my daughter. To find out now, after 22 years, that she really isn't, would create a major impact on who and what I think I am. Would I feel relieved that I had been absent in someone's life who turns out really isn't my biological daughter? Not really, not when I now know she grew being told I was her father. (This is something I was never sure of, owing to the negative feelings C__ was having about me at the time of our parting.) I would feel especially sad now that L__ has found me and we've begun contact with one another.

Of course I can not -- and would not want to -- replace any man that raised L__. I don't yet know what the situation was for her growing up; we haven't had a chance to discuss any of that yet. But I have to accept that she may have had a stepfather who she views as Daddy; in fact, I hope she did. I want whatever would have made her life better. So I'm not looking to take that role from someone who may already have it; I just want the chance to connect with her and see what relationship we might be able to have. I gave up the chance to be her "real" father, the man in her life as she grew up, but I hope to get the chance to be whatever other kind of father figure I can be in her adult life.

“Why doesn’t he call?”

Just read this article about absent fathers ... it makes me feel like crap, but this is the reality I have to be willing to face, the possibility that my dropping out of the picture 21 years ago may have caused similar feelings in L___. (I know I haven't gotten into the details of it all yet, but I'm working my way back and forth the different strands of the story as they're happening.)

So far my limited communication with her has not given me any real indication of what her experience was like.


And I have to confess, the waiting is killing me. I know her college schedule is hyper intense, but I after all these years of not knowing what was going on with her and then to be contacted by her five weeks ago only to have to wait to go the next step ... it's tough.

"How Do You Deal With An Absent Parent"

1987

So, how did I get to this point, that I have a daughter nearly 22 years old that I haven't seen since she was a week old?

Well...

It was spring 1987. I was dating D___, who I had been seeing for over two years. I knew her because she was an actress who worked with my best friend at a store on the Upper East Side. We had met a few times at the store, but didn't start seeing one another until after hanging out at my friend's wedding. It was ... an off-and-on relationship.

We'd be together for a period of time, but then drift apart. There was an emotional connection between us, but it didn't seem to weather the ups and downs of two struggling creative individuals. We separated several times ... but would then drift back together. It was getting to be somewhat of a joke amongst our friends, to be honest.

In my heart, I was looking for something ... more. D___'s desire to be an actress fizzled out soon after she finished acting school. She didn't have the stomach for the constant rejection, and I can't say I blame her. She was actually quite good, especially at Shakespeare, but she was sort of caught in-between when it came to casting: not a typical leading lady type but not "character" enough for juicy supporting roles. So she drifted from acting, got a job working for a marketing company and settled into more of a domestic routine; she liked hanging out a home and watching TV.

As for me, after graduating NYU film, I worked as a crew person in almost every position on a movie set except for hair & makeup. I learned a lot, had some great experiences ... but soon realized no one was going to hire me as a director while I was hauling cable, setting up lights or assisting camera. The best you can hope for, in terms or working up the crew ladder, is if you want to be a Director of Photogrpahy; that's really the highest position you can attain.

So I quit it and focused on writing, since many of my film heroes had advanced that way. To make money, I began driving a NYC taxi. (Chalk it up to too many repeated viewings of TAXI DRIVER when I was younger. And no ... there are not nearly enough interesting stories to tell that will make up for all the hours of sheer tedium.)

So while I was not making any major headway in my own creative pursuits, I had aspirations and desires. And I felt D___ was not interested in that ... and, to be brutally and unflatteringly honest, it did affect my feelings some because I didn't want to settle down yet. I still had a well of deep feelings for her -- both of us came from dysfunctional homes that helped forge a common bond -- but I found myself yearning for something ... more.

Sometime in April of 1987 my friend E___ called me up and asked if I was seeing anyone currently. Back at NYU, we had both been dorm counselors -- Resident Fellows, in the parlance -- and had dated for a micro-second, until, despite my long hair and beard and R'n'R appearance, she discovered I was decidely not the hardcore been-to-hell-and-back-again bad-boy type she was typically attracted to. But we stayed friends, and every once in a while she would try to set me up with someone. These attempts hadn't worked out yet, each ending after only one date, but I appreciated the effort.

So, since D___ and I were heading toward being on the outs once again, I told E___ I was free and would be interested in meeting her latest match-making candidate.

"This time will be different," she said. "I feel it. Besides ... this will be the third person I've set you up with and, you know, third time is always lucky."

THE HAND OF FATIMA

Just found this article in the NY TIMES. I used to enjoy reading Robert Palmer's music articles (the journalist, not the "Addicted To Love" singer) in the paper. Didn't realize he had such a turbulent life: drugs, multiple marriages ... and a daughter who he left when she was one month old. She's made a documentary about him called "The Hand of Fatima".

From the article: 

For Ms. Palmer the film was a quest to understand her father, whom she did not meet until she was 12 and who thereafter remained a sphinx to her.

But the part that of course really hit me was:

"I had set aside a lot of anger and hurt that I had about him leaving me when I was a baby,” Ms. Palmer said, “and maybe that came back when he left me again when he died."

 I don't want L___ to experience that. If she's got anger, I want her to get it out now, while I'm here. Doesn't mean it will all be resolved, but I want her to have the opportunity to express and hopefully release as much as possible while I'm here to take responsibility for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/arts/music/16palmer.html?_r=1&hpw