I don't speak much about my own father. I haven't seen him in 20 years, haven't spoken to him in almost 13. I pretty much consider myself an orphan. My mom is passed..and my father...just out there..somewhere.
He wasn't the greatest. He had issues, of which I will probably never completely understand. My parents marrige was like oil and water...very odd dynamics with me, an only child, somewhere in the middle as a barameter and pawn. He was a NYC cop..handsome and dashing when young in his uniform, odd and bizarre when he got older. His nickname on the force was "Crash" for some reason. I have childhood memories of going to present Christmas parties, dirty basements of NYC police buildings, diverse groups of kids and loud drunken shouts, waiting for a dressed up Santa to give out the treats, being asked "Oh, you're Crash's daughter?" Yes...I am the Lame.
When I was growing up, he was estranged from his own family..so much that I didn't even met my paternal grandmother until I was 7 when she came for my first communion and brought my cousin Christine for me to meet too. What his problem was with his mother ( his own father died when I was a baby of a brain tumor) and his two younger sisiters? I don't know, but the fact is that I missed knowing a huge portion of my family growing up.
I think that often, my own experiences with my dad allow me to understand some of the complex feelings that adoptees must deal with. Rejection from one own flesh and blood. My father basically divorced me too when he and my mother split. Periodically, throughout the years, I have held out an olive branch, hoping that he could be honest, admite his part in wrong doings, and see me as a person worthy of bothering with. It never works. In the last two years, he called here, at my home once. Thank goodness I was at work and Rye talked to him. He did leave his number, but I cannot call him...I have the need to protect myself emotionally...and my children too. Rye had given him my email addy and I would have written to him to feel out the waters, but he never bothered to write me. The urge to have a child, remember his daughter, was apparently fleeting.
The other fallout of his issues, again, is that I have this huge part of family that I know almost nothing of. We, the family, have a most beautiful piece of land up here that has been in the family for generations. I was there as a baby, and then we returned when I was 11. The farm, as it is called, was owned at that time by my grandmother and her two sisters, my great aunts. They would winter in Florida and Arizona, and summer at the farm. Friends would come from all over..staying in the big house ( an original Dutch stone house form the 1600's) or at the bungelows. My father's younger sister, my Aunt Martha, would spend the summers there with my 4 cousins.