ArsenicKiss
Well-known member
I apologize that this is going to be a long and meandering rant. I just feel that this is somewhere that I could talk about all of this and perhaps someone will have some insight, and perhaps no one will be able to help me sort my thoughts and I can just feel better about myself in the end because I managed to get this out.
My mother and father divorced when I was two years old and, for the life of me, I can't actually remember any moment I ever spent with my father. Later in life it was presented to me that this is somehow the way that the man conducted divorces. He would leave the wife and the children. (He had two daughters from marriages before me and he didn't really abandon them quite as much as he did me, because my mother has at least met the daughters in question). I have had no contact in all this time with my father's family. I don't know them at all. I don't know if my biological grandparents are alive, if I have uncles, aunts, cousins. But, then again, the theory holds that they just as easily could have tried to have some contact with me, particularly when I was so young. Or perhaps when I turned sixteen, or even eighteen, or this past summer for my twenty-first birthday. Instead, I am left wondering about half of where I came from. Bits and pieces of the personality of the man that fathered me have been passed to me in the last eight years of my life, generally at the wrong time and in the wrong way by the man my mother is married to now.
On that, my mother remarried almost thirteen years ago. Her husband is the closest thing I have ever had to a father, and if someone were to ask, I would probably tell them that he is my Dad. However, I don't really call him dad, and in conversation I am almost entirely likely to refer to him by his first name and then as my step-father if querried as to who he is because someone doesn't know my situation. I don't dislike him, though we have in fact had our problems over the years. But, the truth is, he stood up to my grandfather for me when I was graduating from highschool and had facial piercings that my grandfather disliked.
Further on the strange subject of family, as I mentioned, I have sisters who I share a father with, but I don't know them beyond their first names, and I suppose their surnames (in the event that our father's name). However, when I am asked if I have siblings, my answer is always yes and no. I basically grew up as an only child until my mother remarried. At that point, I gained a younger brother and I have had, for the past eighteen years, an older brother. He became close to my mother when he was eighteen and has been like my older brother since then. My younger brother, who is expressly my step-brother, I constantly refer to as my brother. It doesn't matter that we don't share a single parent, and hardly grew up in the same house. There isn't much that I wouldn't do for my younger brother, and growing up there wasn't much my older brother wouldn't do for me.
But, I have been thinking about my family a lot recently. I keep wondering what it would be like to meet my father. Or if he remembered this summer that he had a daughter that just turned twenty one. Does he wonder at all what my life is like, if things are working out for me or if I'm in any kind of decent situation at all. So, it occured to me that I might want to find him. I have no idea if the man is actually alive or dead. My mother had said something about him having emphysema and refusing to quit smoking. So, the chances are that he actually could be rotting in the ground.
And, adding to this, a greater number of my friends have been considering marriages and thier own families. I know that if I do meet someone who I choose to marry, my step-father will be the one who walks me down the aisle, but part of me wonders if I should have my biological father there at all. Or if I should even bother to tell him if it ever comes to that. I doubt that I could ever have what really passes as a relationship with my father, but part of me would like to at least know him, or know who he is. (I'm honestly not really sure what the correct statement is about the situation.)
I have strikingly few friends that come from divorced households. And, of the friends that I have who have divorced parents, many of them still regularly saw the parent they did not live with, or the divorces happened after we were done with highschool. So, I talked to the two friends of mine that seem to have the most similar backgrounds to me. My one friend supports my decision to try to find my father. She happens to be going through some family drama of her own, involving her father, and we have agreed to be there for each other through whatever we go through with our respective fathers.
The other friend that I have really spoken to about it thinks that I should drop the issue. Being that I do have a "dad" he thinks I should drop the issue of trying to find my father because it won't really make a difference in my life whether I know the man that walked away like that. Part of me wonders if he cares because there is some sort of emotional... Whatever between the two of us and he is encouraging me not to do anything that could be personally hurtful, but he does have a particularly valid point in all that.
To compound all my weirdness, I have brought up the idea of finding my father to my mother at least once a year since I turned eighteen. Every time I bring it up, she tells me she knows people she could ask to find out if he still lives in the city I grew up in, or if he doesn't still live at all. Something about her reluctance to actually follow through concerns me.
I'm just trying to figure out what the best course of action is for myself here. It's all just very confusing.
My mother and father divorced when I was two years old and, for the life of me, I can't actually remember any moment I ever spent with my father. Later in life it was presented to me that this is somehow the way that the man conducted divorces. He would leave the wife and the children. (He had two daughters from marriages before me and he didn't really abandon them quite as much as he did me, because my mother has at least met the daughters in question). I have had no contact in all this time with my father's family. I don't know them at all. I don't know if my biological grandparents are alive, if I have uncles, aunts, cousins. But, then again, the theory holds that they just as easily could have tried to have some contact with me, particularly when I was so young. Or perhaps when I turned sixteen, or even eighteen, or this past summer for my twenty-first birthday. Instead, I am left wondering about half of where I came from. Bits and pieces of the personality of the man that fathered me have been passed to me in the last eight years of my life, generally at the wrong time and in the wrong way by the man my mother is married to now.
On that, my mother remarried almost thirteen years ago. Her husband is the closest thing I have ever had to a father, and if someone were to ask, I would probably tell them that he is my Dad. However, I don't really call him dad, and in conversation I am almost entirely likely to refer to him by his first name and then as my step-father if querried as to who he is because someone doesn't know my situation. I don't dislike him, though we have in fact had our problems over the years. But, the truth is, he stood up to my grandfather for me when I was graduating from highschool and had facial piercings that my grandfather disliked.
Further on the strange subject of family, as I mentioned, I have sisters who I share a father with, but I don't know them beyond their first names, and I suppose their surnames (in the event that our father's name). However, when I am asked if I have siblings, my answer is always yes and no. I basically grew up as an only child until my mother remarried. At that point, I gained a younger brother and I have had, for the past eighteen years, an older brother. He became close to my mother when he was eighteen and has been like my older brother since then. My younger brother, who is expressly my step-brother, I constantly refer to as my brother. It doesn't matter that we don't share a single parent, and hardly grew up in the same house. There isn't much that I wouldn't do for my younger brother, and growing up there wasn't much my older brother wouldn't do for me.
But, I have been thinking about my family a lot recently. I keep wondering what it would be like to meet my father. Or if he remembered this summer that he had a daughter that just turned twenty one. Does he wonder at all what my life is like, if things are working out for me or if I'm in any kind of decent situation at all. So, it occured to me that I might want to find him. I have no idea if the man is actually alive or dead. My mother had said something about him having emphysema and refusing to quit smoking. So, the chances are that he actually could be rotting in the ground.
And, adding to this, a greater number of my friends have been considering marriages and thier own families. I know that if I do meet someone who I choose to marry, my step-father will be the one who walks me down the aisle, but part of me wonders if I should have my biological father there at all. Or if I should even bother to tell him if it ever comes to that. I doubt that I could ever have what really passes as a relationship with my father, but part of me would like to at least know him, or know who he is. (I'm honestly not really sure what the correct statement is about the situation.)
I have strikingly few friends that come from divorced households. And, of the friends that I have who have divorced parents, many of them still regularly saw the parent they did not live with, or the divorces happened after we were done with highschool. So, I talked to the two friends of mine that seem to have the most similar backgrounds to me. My one friend supports my decision to try to find my father. She happens to be going through some family drama of her own, involving her father, and we have agreed to be there for each other through whatever we go through with our respective fathers.
The other friend that I have really spoken to about it thinks that I should drop the issue. Being that I do have a "dad" he thinks I should drop the issue of trying to find my father because it won't really make a difference in my life whether I know the man that walked away like that. Part of me wonders if he cares because there is some sort of emotional... Whatever between the two of us and he is encouraging me not to do anything that could be personally hurtful, but he does have a particularly valid point in all that.
To compound all my weirdness, I have brought up the idea of finding my father to my mother at least once a year since I turned eighteen. Every time I bring it up, she tells me she knows people she could ask to find out if he still lives in the city I grew up in, or if he doesn't still live at all. Something about her reluctance to actually follow through concerns me.
I'm just trying to figure out what the best course of action is for myself here. It's all just very confusing.
