Longing for a Father
I longed for a father until I was sixteen. My father had been killed in a motorcycle accident when I was just over a year old and my mother was pregnant with my brother. He’d been riding a motorcycle for the first time — without a helmet. The crash left him with a fractured skull, which he would die from within days. I suspect, now, that it was an act of self-destruction and that he was not happy or well. He was a veteran of World War II, a marine who’d been to Japan and I had the impression that he’d never really recovered. My mother would have denied this. In the years that followed his death, my father’s intelligence, skills, good looks and generosity would take on mythic proportions in her stories, though there were hints that their union had not been without its problems. At the time he died, he had a separate apartment from my mother and me. But she would never admit that he was anything less than perfect.
Throughout my childhood, my father was always with us — looking over us like a guardian angel. I imagined him there each night when I went to sleep, although I could never get a clear picture of him in my mind. There were no photos of him around, and the self-portrait that hung on the wall next to one he did of my mother didn’t help me to really see him. It was sketchy black charcoal with no other color. He had high cheekbones and a tall forehead, but I couldn’t see any real expression on his face, couldn’t match this image with the person in my mother’s stories. The portrait of my mother was a more finished piece, showing her blue eyes and flowing red hair under a wide-brimmed hat.
There may not have been photos of him, but there were plenty of other tangible reminders of the man he had been, such as the box of stubby oil pastels he used to create many of the drawings that hung on our walls. And there was his dark, curved wooden pipe along with the remains of a foil package of tobacco that kicked around the house, as if both would be needed at any moment to fill the air with a sweet, spicy scent.
When Santa came at Christmas, we believed my father came with him. We prepared every Christmas Eve for their arrival, which would take place long after my brother and I had gone to sleep. We put a plate of carrots out on our tenement fire escape for the reindeer, and we put out a thermos of coffee and two cups, one for my father and one for Santa. On Christmas morning, we’d dash into the living room while it was still dark outside to see that both coffee cups had been used even before checking to see what gifts we’d been left.
I missed him even though I’d never really known him. I just knew that he’d been there, that he’d taken care of me, taken care of us, while he was around. He did a drawing of me as a baby. Looking at that drawing, I could feel his eyes on me as they must have been when he drew it. Tenderer were the still life drawings of my shoes, pacifier and baby brush.
It was only in the last two years of his life that my father took up visual art. He was a trained stage actor and playwright, a graduate of Yale’s School of Dramatic Arts. I’m not sure when he gave up those pursuits or if he ever did so deliberately. I understood he drank quite a lot. But then, so did my mother. I imagine they drank a lot together. The story was they met in a bar on Thanksgiving Day.
As much as the memory of my father was kept alive in our family, and I admired him, I was willing to accept another father. My favorite television show was The Brady Bunch. I dreamed of being one of the siblings of that blended clan. I think the show offered a promise of a possible family — one with two parents, even if they weren’t the ones you started out with. When my mother dated, which was rarely, I was open-minded and eager for any relationship to blossom into something serious. But my mother said she just wasn’t meant for marriage. She’d been married once before my father, when she was 19, but neither marriage had lasted more than two years.
I grew up in the 1970s. It was the decade of divorce, especially in New York City, so I was not alone in having a single parent. I watched as my friends went through their parents’ breakups. I felt almost lucky that I didn’t have to endure what they were experiencing, although most of them did have two parents involved in their lives. Two of my friends lived with single fathers. Sometimes I fantasized about what it would be like to have just a father, or wondered what it would be like if my mother would marry one of my friends’ single fathers. Then we could have our own Brady Bunch.
I think I mostly just wanted to have another adult around to balance my mother’s unconventional and erratic perspective on life. We lived in such a vacuum and there was so much pressure on my brother and me. My mother somehow managed to be both neglectful and overprotective of us at the same time. We were never encouraged to have our own social lives. She kept a very tight rein on the both of us. She had essentially lost her first two children from a previous marriage. Her parents had taken over raising them as she went through bouts of drinking and stays in rehabilitation and psychiatric wards. My mother had always referred to what her parents did as kidnapping. It was only when I was older that I really understood that it was because she was unable to be a parent that she lost them. Their father had walked out shortly after my sister was born.
My mother tried to clean up her act with my brother and me. And she didn’t let us out of her sight. We never even met my grandparents, who lived in Queens across the river from us. There was an unwritten pact: We would dote on her and she would dote on us. But even though she was very focused on us, it’s not like she was the kind of mom who sat playing with us. She didn’t give up her adult entertainment. We just had to accompany her. We went to concerts and museums and political conventions, sat at bars with her friends, and watched movies with adult situations. We missed out on a great deal of normal, childhood experiences such as bike riding, playing in playgrounds, playing ping-pong. We even missed long periods of school for travel.
But the real problem was that this was unsustainable. It all ended when we hit adolescence. She just wasn’t prepared for us to be wholly separate individuals. Unfortunately, the more tightly she held on the more we rebelled. A battle ensued. Her drinking got worse, my brother and I began to cut school. We were in family counseling, but our world was spinning out of control. There were drunken fights and the police at our door. It was as if the vacuum we were in had been punctured.
Then it happened. A confession. I remember the scene like it was yesterday and not more than 30 years ago. My mother was extremely drunk. She sat on the plush, royal blue carpeting of our living room floor, leaning against one of two round tables we used as coffee tables. One knee was bent up in front of her, her other leg was sprawled out on the floor. It was a decidedly unladylike position. I sat on a chair a few feet away. It was our nightly fight. I didn’t know it at the time, but there would be very few after this one.
“Now look,” she said slurring her words. “Robert was not your father.” She emphasized the “not” and “father”.
If this was related to something we had been discussing, I don’t recall. I was in shock. Completely speechless. The perfect guardian who’d watched over me all those years, the man who’d snuck me and my mother out of the hospital when I was born because they didn’t have the money to pay the bill, the man who I’d called “dada” before his death, was not really my father after all?
“He never knew about you,” she said, referring to my biological father, and snapping me back to the conversation. Then, she added, victoriously: “Your father was gay and I cured him.” This was too much. It was laughable that my mother, who had been in and out of mental institutions, thought that she could “cure” anything. I found it offensive, and unlike her, to think homosexuality was something that needed curing and that she had done so with her feminine wiles. But it was all beside the point. I had lost my guardian angel. It was too great a loss to imagine, so I did what I had learned to do with much that was painful. I blew it off.
Many would ask me over the years why I didn’t seek out my biological father. I finally had a chance at the father I’d always wanted. A real, in the flesh father. My life had already been ruined by one parent, I reasoned, I didn’t need to find another to disappoint me. Also, my mother had said my father was gay, probably living a gay lifestyle. Did he need me to come into his life? (Over the next two decades, I would begin to see more gay and lesbian couples as parents, but at this point I saw none.)
I soon left my mother’s home, moving in with my boyfriend, who was a father substitute to a large extent and who I would later marry. But the real reason I didn’t go looking for my father was something else. My mother had created a fairy-tale father, a larger than life figure, an angel. No one would ever live up to the father I’d had, the father I’d lost.
Dorian Burden is a middle school English teacher and writer who is working on a memoir.
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