A dream or a nightmare?? The jury is still out…

So, I haven’t written anything in over a month so naturally this post would be fueled with fire.  For those that don’t know me personally, I’m 32 years old, my brother and I were raised by our mother since I was 3.  We haven’t seen our father over the past 30 years.  Or that’s what I thought until last week.  Growing up, my mother never said an ill word against my father (why I don’t know because I’ve since learned that there was so much more than him just leaving) and just like any other child in a single parent household, I was curious about him.  Curious what he was like, curious why he left, curious as to why he never attempted to get in touch with us.  What kind of man just walks away from his wife and two small children and doesn’t look back?  I guess I’ll never know.

Jump to 2010…my mother has reconnected with old classmates and family through the wonder that is Facebook.  Last week I come home from work and she corners me in the kitchen and says “I need to talk to you about something.”  My first reaction was, “Oh God.  Who died now?” (the past year has been a bad year for my family as the elders have started dropping off one by one.)  She then proceeded to tell me that over the past few months she has been getting email notifications that her ex-husband, my father, has been trying to contact her through Classmates.com but she’s been ignoring them.  However, today, he’s tried a new route and sent her a message through Facebook.  He wants to know what she’s told us (my brother and I) about him.  He wants to contact us and thought it was best to go through her first. (ya think?)  I could just imagine getting a message on Facebook that says, “Hi Jennifer.  I’m your Father.” and I’d have Star Wars playing through my head from then on.  I laughed at her.  Literally.  In her face, laughed at her.  Looked her dead in the eye and said, “You’re serious?!” (excuse my french on this next part…) “Thirty fucking years and NOW he wants to contact us?!  Tell him to fuck off.”  She wasn’t about to argue my position because as I later found out, he had plenty of chances to be a part of our lives.

I still do not know why he left us 30 years ago, other than my mother telling me that he “wanted to be 19 forever” while he was already 29.  Although my mother let him go, she didn’t give up without a fight.  She followed him across county and state lines to track him down for child support payments, and when she finally caught up to him she gave him a choice.  Pay or sign away your parental rights.  It only took him 24 hours to make that decision.  I was 3 then.  My brother was only a few months old.  Sometime before I became a teenager there were at least two instances that my mother allowed my father to see us.  She even gave him an opportunity to be a part of our lives then, even though so many years had passed.  Again, nothing.  For whatever reason, I have no memory of these meetings, I do however remember being in the place and time of when she said they occurred.  Obviously he didn’t make a lasting impression.

For all of my life it was the three of us.  We were always together, even in the middle of the night at a hotel in Baltimore that my mother had to drag us to so that she could run inventory with the staff for the acquisition.  My brother and I were accustomed to being held up in accounting offices at all hours of the day or night with nothing to do.  That is until we were old enough to make sense of numbers and filing systems, and then we got put to work.  Come to think of it, she owes a lot of back pay…lol.  But I digress.  Without the assistance of child support, my mother had to work 60+ hours a week to provide us with whatever we wanted.  And somehow she still managed to involve us in various activities.  My brother was all about soccer.  I was music lessons, choir recitals, bowling, and whatever else I could find to do with my friends.  If she managed to get 5 hours of sleep per night, I’d be surprised.  To call her a workaholic is mild.  She was a driving force within the hotel industry.  She ignored the pain, she ignored everything that was going wrong with her body because of us.  She didn’t have any other option.  A few years later, my mother would be physically disabled and no longer able to work, or even drive a vehicle.  Luckily, my brother and I were able to provide for ourselves, but who was going to provide for her?  I won’t subject you to the woes of what our lives have become, we struggled but we are surviving.

Ten years later, that man who had so easily walked out of our lives comes trotting back like only a day had passed.  I can’t say I’m not still curious as to the what’s and why’s of it all, but I’ll be damned if I’ll make it so easy for him when my mother had to work herself into early “retirement” to provide for us.  There are no free passes.  You don’t get to wake up one day when your old and grey and decide that now is the time to get to know your children.  You didn’t want us, as made perfectly clear over the past 30 years of you not being here.  There is no way in hell that I would subject my mother to watching you waltz in now that all the hard work is done and be a part of our lives.  I just can’t get over it…30 years.  Not 1, not 2, hell, not even 10.  30 fucking years.   Am I being too harsh?  Is there such a thing in this instance?