In recent months, my biological father has made a surprise reappearance in my life. Sometimes, when referring to him, I catch myself calling him my ‘real’ father which couldn’t be farther from the truth. One of those life lessons that I’ve learned the long hard way over the years is that helping to conceive a child doesn’t necessarily make a person a parent. If anything, the man that I call dad most of the time, the guy who doesn’t have one single strand of dna in common with me, who has been divorced from my mom for years now, he’s my ‘real’ dad. He was the one that raised me, gave me away when I got married, rushed from the hospital when my daughter was born to buy every single pink preemie garment he could find, and is still there whenever I need him.

This other fella, my bio dad, he’s been as much the opposite as one can be. During my early years he would unwillingly take the three of us (my brother, sister, and I) for a weekend and then we wouldn’t see him again until my mother hunted him down at whatever dismal hole-in-the-wall joint he was drowning his life away at, and force him to “be a father” for a few more days. These weekends spent with my dad were always strange experiences and almost seem like dreams I conjured up in my childhood. He has always been a heavy drinker and he’d pick us up with a beer between his legs and pass out at the end of the night with a whiskey bottle close at hand. We were free to roam the neighborhood he lived in, an area where we were the only white people to be seen and where pit bulls snarled at the end of  short chains and the men gathered around fires in the backyards every night for drinking and fighting. We would bath in a huge tin tub outside when we did take baths, water drawn up at the neighbor’s house and carried over by the bucketful. I can remember running outside naked when it rained with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, shivering and laughing all at once as we rushed to get clean before the downpour slowed. My father had no concept of parenting at all. Where my mother was inordinately strict about random, and in the end inconsequential, things - he didn’t care what we did, as long as he could deliver us back to our mother unharmed and basically in the condition she dropped us off in.

Once, I took a pair of rusty scissors to my  long pale blond hair and hacked half off it of. Only half though. I went the entire weekend with half of my hair to my chin and the other  down my back without my dad ever once noticing. Another time, he took us swimming in a strip pit (an old mining pit, closed down, and filled with very clear water) in March. My sister caught pneumonia (or was it bronchitis??) and ended up spending two months in a large plastic bubble in the hospital recovering. When we were still quite small, my dad thought it was hilarious to sic me on my sister. He’d nudge his friends and say, “watch this” and say “get her, betty” and I, like the desperate for attention child I was, would jump on my sister and we’d commence to biting and scratching and hitting. Apparently I always won these little battles because I was nicknamed the bulldog when I was two. He would end every night with a round of ghost stories, most based on the bullet holes still quite evident in the walls and posts of his house. He’d whisper and squawk and generally terrify the three of us as we huddled together on the pull-out bed in his one room house and then, when we were all settled down and nearly asleep, he liked to sneak out the back way and scratch at the windows or pound on the door and scare the holy living shit out of us.

This was my dad.

There was something about him that we absolutely loved in those days. Perhaps it was just the fact that he wasn’t my mother. Getting away from her iron fists and volatile emotions was simply enough for us at times. I think a big part of it was also because he was himself - he was inaccessible to us in a gruff grown up way. The man was fucked up in his own right and working on destroying his health, his relationships, his life. We were only there to be witnesses, unlike with my mother where we were woven inescapably into the destruction she wrought.

And there was one thing that my father did for me when I was young that made me love him to this day. When I was little Sesame Street was the premier kid’s show to watch. There was no Dora the Explorer or Blues Clues for competition. When we turned on our t.v. in the morning Sesame Street greeted us with it’s primary hued puppets and sing song lessons. Of all the characters on the show, The Amazing Mumford was by far my favorite. The Amazing Mumford was a magician that never seemed to get his spells just right. He always turned people into chickens or made cookies appear when he was trying to make a dove disappear. The magic words he used on this ill-fated attempts were “Ala peanut butter sandwiches!!”.

Now, The Amazing Mumford was not as popular a character as, say, Big Bird or Snuffle-whateverthefuckhisnameis. It was nearly impossible for my mom to find character goodies for me to deck myself out in (’specially considering almost all of our clothing came second hand from church donations or thrift stores). So it was always a surprise and a delight to me as a child that my dad remembered my love for The Amazing Mumford. My dad didn’t remember such things. He still can’t remember how to spell my name correctly (and HE picked it). I’m not sure he could even really tell my sister and I apart when we were small, despite the fact that she was a rounder, darker, more vivacious child. For whatever reason, he remembered Mumford though and every time that we’d visit, when he’d make his specialty lunch for us (peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which I can’t eat to this day without nearly choking on the nostalgia), he’d always say with great flair and dramatics ‘ALA peanut butter and honey sandwich!!” when he placed mine before me. And for a few brief moments, my dad loved me and only me, seperate of the other children, and this was a new and overwhelming thing to experience.

When I was eight, my uncle, my dad’s only living relative save the brood of children the uncle spawned, was released from prison after a decade long stint. Family legend has it that Uncle E had shot and killed the middle brother of the family during a long drinking session one night. The middle brother was apparently depressed and unable to pull the trigger himself and had resorted to nettling his hot tempered siblings in the hopes that they’d take up the pistol and do the dirty work for him. My dad left the two arguing brothers and went on a beer run and returned to one dead brother and another that wouldn’t see freedom, his wife, or children, for many long years. Regardless of whether the family stories have it right or not - we were never aware of any uncles that existed on my dad’s side of the family. On my mom’s there was a whole host of fucked up aunts that trooped in and out sporadically, only congregating all together for funerals and those meetings always ended in loud unruly arguments and years-long grudges. So imagine how it was to be told that not only did we have an uncle but he was a criminal that had apparently murdered our other uncle.

This, my friends, is how everything in my father’s life was and is. Shrouded in mystery, legend, and alcohol soaked myth. Along with these magically appearing uncles, we also had nearly a dozen just-add-water and watch ‘em grow sisters scattered throughout the country. My father, despite the haggard effects of alcohol, drugs, and too many ‘good’ times, is a lady killer. It seems he manages to spawn another little girl every two to three years. I’ve stopped keeping count. I’ve also stopped being surprised when girls with vaguely similar eyes and mannerisms show up on my doorstep and hope to bond. I suppose that’s another good part about moving away - I don’t have that to avoid any longer.

Anyhow, when this sprung from earth completely formed and six foot seven uncle appeared on the scene, my dad decided to take off to the uncle’s home state for a visit. He packed only a suitcase, leaving a one room shack without electricity or running water full of his paintings and carved figures with a front yard peppered with ornate rusted metal sculptures and a beer bottle walkway leading to the dented door …. and three children who fully expected their father to return in a few months to his once-a-month-or-so life with them. Instead we received a postcard of a city we’d never heard of in Ohio (my sister and I looked it up on a map afterward and both of us were still puzzled by it even after seeing the red dot marking it’s place) explaining that he’d decided to put down roots there and inviting us to come and visit some time.

We were not in the position to be that hurt or shocked by his defection. To be honest, our life at that point was made up by the lies and cruelty of the adults that surrounded us. We also knew that our father found us to be more of a nuisance than a pleasure to have around. Often he would be scheduled to pick us up and we’d sit on the front stoop with bags packed, eager and waiting, until dark fell and our mother’s temper snapped. Then, mom would load us all in her car and she’d drive around hunting for our father. When she found him she took one of two tactics: her favorite was to take a baseball bat to his car and bust out his headlights or windshield, shouting at him when he appeared at the door of whatever place he’d been hiding out at, “NOW you have a reason not to come and see your kids”; her other method involved invading every bar and friend’s house of his that she knew him to frequent, dragging the three of us behind her like exhausted bedraggled proof of his negligence. She’d triumphantly point us out to everyone and crow, “they were WAITING for their father and he never showed up”. Shaming him didn’t work as well as attacking him, though and the baseball bat was often employed. Looking back on it now, I wonder how it was that she was never stopped.  He was known to befriend the shady rough underbelly of society. We grew up watching the men fist fight around the campfire and the women scream and tear at each others hair. The rapport of a gun being pulled to bring order back to a gathering didn’t scare us as much as it should have. My mother’s ability to strut into any of those places and attack one of their accepted companions is just more proof of how scary tough that woman was.

Through the years my feelings toward the man whose loins I sprung from have varied from one extreme to the next. My brother and sister seemed to settle quickly on hostility and resentment and they stayed in that camp for quite some time, a place my mother was happy to see them in. I wasn’t as easy to scare away. Some part of me insisted on keeping in contact with him even when he didn’t reciprocate and when my mother discouraged it. I wrote to him several times a year from the day we got that postcard until I was in my teens. Even then I touched base with him every so often to make sure he was still alive and kicking. He suffered a cancer scare a few years back and recovered with amazing speed and returned to the bottle with even more dedication.

In the past couple of years I’ve changed greatly. I don’t know how obvious it is to any of y’all (well, I’d say any of the old school readers from my brgriff or sanetwin days will agree), but I’ve become an entirely different person than I was as a teenager. Perhaps this happens for everyone. I’m glad to say that it seems to be for the better for me. While I’m way more introverted than I ever have been, I’m also more soft spoken, more tolerant, and less quick to anger. My temper, when it does show, is nothing compared to what it once was. I like to stop and think through my actions now (whoa). I try to help others as much as I can and my family has become more important to me.

As a result, my dad has entered my mind lately. I’m afraid that he will die without Analise really getting to meet him. The last time the two of them saw each other she was only a toddler and she has no idea who he is. More than that, I’m afraid that he’ll die before I’m ready. How incredibly selfish of me, huh? While I try not to dwell on my mother and her impact on my life and my mental health, I know that one day I’ll have to face the death of my parents and I’ll have to deal with the feelings I’ve kept tamped down for all these years. With dad, I have a strange urge to understand him and his motives. And even if I can’t do that - to let him know that I don’t hate him and I’m not mad at him for leaving so long ago. A part of me thinks that he was doing what he thought was best - trying to save us from who he was and the mistakes he was bound to make. The other part is pretty pissed off that he left us at our mom’s mercy.

He’s announced his intentions to visit at the beginning of December. He’s been talking to my sister on the phone (whenever they both have phone service), to the point that a candor and a commradory has built between them. With me, it’s text messages. A joke every now and then, a picture of him smiling uncomfortably, a quick hello. He tells my sister that he doesn’t know what to say to me, he thinks of me as a different sort of person than himself and my sister. The lifestyle I choose, the fact that I went to college, hell I guess even the way I talk, have worked together to alienate him. He has a wary pride in me based entirely upon a distant glimpse into my life.

Likewise, I’m uncertain what to say to him. His pride puts me in a position that I’m unsure of how to handle. I don’t feel as if I’m anything to be proud of. I want to be able to take my life into my hands and hold it out for him to look down into and see something wonderful or great cupped there in my little hands, proof that I did something, am somebody, am worthy. It’s all mixed up in my head - this wanting to impress a father I barely know, feeling as if I’m nothing impressive and despairing that he’ll get to know me and see that and ….. then what?

Perhaps I’d be better off handling it how he did all of those years ago; when he wanted to show me he loved me but he didn’t know how. When he hits town, I’ll invite him over for lunch. I’ll use an old family recipe and make up something he’ll like. And when I place it in front of him, I’ll say, “ALA peanut butter and honey sandwich!”.

Editor’s pick by Loralee of Loralee’s Looney Tunes: This is the first post of Geek-Betty’s that I ever read and it grabbed me by the heart and shook me to the core. Her bio pretty much says it all, “I’m not your average garden-variety PTA mom. This blog is not PG-13. I live with bikers, date musicians, have a sailor for an ex-husband, and I am related to a family of schizophrenics and manic depressives. I am bipolar and constantly teetering on the verge of poverty, heartbreak, or insanity. I heartily enjoying cursing, drinking, sex, and knitting. “ She is raw, honest, moving and funny and I recommend giving her a read and/or following her on Twitter.