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.