Fathers

I absolutely thought about my nfather as much as my nmother as I was growing up. My aparents told me what they knew about both, which wasn't much. The story about my nfather was that he was engaged to my nmother but it didn't work out. He was tall, and was graduating from college. That was pretty much all I knew.

Then when I sent off for my non-identifying information, I learned another story. He was supposedly 26 years old at the time of my birth (but had never been told about me). He was 6'5", blond hair, blue eyes, a zoologist from a "well-to-do" East Coast family with one sibling. He had lived in Hawaii for a year, was in graduate school, was in the service and was heading to Vietnam. I was thrilled to think I knew more about him.

That story, too, turned out to be hogwash, although at one point the CI told me that she'd found this bogus man, and that he had died. How pathetic is that? To outright lie to an adoptee? Happens all the time, though.

All I know now to be true are two things: 1. From my DNA test, he is Spanish Basque. 2. He gave me Factor V Leiden.

Everything else is a guess. Maybe I get my height from him. Maybe some of my temperament. Maybe my curly hair. Maybe some of my facility for languages and ability to reproduce the intricacies of accents. Maybe some of my more extreme nerdiness. It's nearly impossible to say which of these things are just me and which come from him; there is no point of reference.

I may never know more. Sometimes it's fun to fantasize about him, other times it saddens me profoundly. I have accepted this lack of information as one of those tragedies I must live with, however. I don't have the emotional bandwidth to do much more with my situation now, perhaps ever.