filling in a blank, part 1

About two years ago, when I was just beginning to write my pretty dumb things, I was simultaneously considering trying to get in touch with Larry, my birthfather. I used a people-search service to track him down, and I found some information that seemed to point to the man whose DNA I share and whose last name I own to this day. I wrote him a letter. After writing it, I felt uncertain about what I wanted from him. I couldn’t parse it out in my own mind, and so feeling at a loss as to how to understand my own desires, I posted the letter here and more or less shelved my desire to find him.

This past week, he found me.

Last Wednesday began like any other normal day. I woke up. I turned on my computer, as I always do. I fumbled toward the bathroom, pausing to feed my cat. I peed. While brushing my teeth, I opened my Firefox, and while flossing them, my email.

That was when normalcy came to a skidding halt. In my email, the account I use specifically for this blog, was an email from an unfamiliar address; its subject line read, “if you’re Chelsea Girl, your message has been received,” only instead of “Chelsea Girl” was my real name in all of its six-syllable legality. Slightly freaked out, I opened the email and read it.

It was from my biological father, whom I’ve not seen since my mother divorced him when I was under a year old. He found me through this blog.

I don’t know how much of my blog my birthfather has read. I haven’t asked. In fact, though we have in the past five days corresponded a few times, I have yet to ask him a single question. The very act feels beyond me. I don’t know where to start, and I think I fear that once I start I won’t be able to stop. There is a flood dammed up behind a fortress of psychic walls, and I neither know how to siphon off a small potable bit of it, nor do I know that I were I able to that the full weight of it wouldn’t crash down and smother me.

Wednesday, the day I first heard from Larry, I spent in a fugue state. I felt a centimeter away from catatonia. I felt disoriented and buffeted about by a great swirling emotional maelstrom. I felt a short distance from crying at every moment of the day. Today, still, tears remain a hand’s breadth away. If I give in, if I allow myself to experience the full swell of the emotional tide inside me, I would sob uncontrollably. It’s something I just can’t yet allow myself to do. I fear I wouldn’t stop.

If you’re not adopted, if you’ve never been abandoned by a parent, if you spent your childhood without losing a family member, you are not going to know what I’m experiencing. But if you have, you do. And it’s beyond intense. Where I’m sitting “strange” looks good. How I feel is as if I’ve been submerged in an industrial-sized vat of What The Fuck! How I feel is beyond my words, and I’m pretty good with words.

It is beyond metaphor. It is beyond name. How I feel is a screaming cacophony of intense and conflicting emotions. How I feel  is simultaneously my four-year-old self wishing romantically on a star for her daddy and the forty-four year-old self I am now who knows that wish is impossible: I have no daddy; I will never have a daddy; that daddy time has come and gone for me and all I will ever have is a blank space where daddy should have been.

How I feel is simultaneously elated that this person has found me, that my decades-old hope of having my birthfather appear before me—sudden as a dream—in person, in letter, on the phone, how I feel is elated that this hope has suddenly and electronically come true. How I feel is apprehensive that before me waits this stranger of whom I am undoubtedly part—his allergies are my allergies; his migraines are my migraines; his bi-polar is my bi-polar; his syntax is my syntax—and I don’t know what he wants or what I want and how can I trust him. How can I believe in him and how can I not?

How I feel is confused, and not merely because there is this man presents himself to me, and though I don’t know him, he is much me as my mother is me. I feel confused because I look forward to his emails, because I want to throw myself at him in a thoughtless headlong rush, because I want to share myself with him on a silver platter, because what I feel is most like the excitement I feel when I am falling in love. Because I fear I’ll fall in love with this man  with whom my mother fell in love, and look at how that ended. Because this love is weird and crazy and inexplicable and I fear it’s as much a testament to my childhood desire for a daddy than it is to my adult wish for context. It is weird to feel for my unknown father what I most clearly have felt for a lover, and even though my therapist tells me it’s normal, it feels beyond bizarre.

How I feel is as if this blank that I know, and know well—its emptiness is comfortable to me, its emptiness has defined me, its emptiness has weight and meaning—how I feel as if this blank is getting filled in, and that is deeply disconcerting. My absent father has always felt to me like those shadow blasts on the buildings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, left as fragile humans vaporized and stolid buildings remained. His absence has always been palpably present. I am who I am because he abandoned me. I have made choices predicated on his abandonment. I have seen myself a certain way because where I was supposed to have a father, I had a bright and shiny outline, a limned body-shaped space.

Who am I as I fill in this blank? Who am I as I see myself reflected in this mirror of this eerily familiar stranger? And how do I begin to negotiate the distance that separates us?

I have no answers. I’m not looking for them, not yet. I’m just feeling what I feel and talking about it a lot and waiting patiently, waiting without waiting, like a Zen koan, for the time when something, however small, makes sense.

Comments

[O]

As always, I'm in awe of your ability to find expression for the things that are beyond expression.

I don't think there is anything to do except what you are doing, the waiting without waiting.

Love,
O

[Kochanie]

When you said the news you received was "deep," you weren't exaggerating.

I do understand what you are going through, and this is not the place or time to dwell on my experience. What does matter is the honesty and courage with which you are dealing with this memory-made-flesh.

All I can say is that I wish you the very best.

[Viviane]

You've taken the first steps. Interesting the way I immediately equated abandonment=adoption in my email.

I know you have a therapist who gets you and who you trust, I hope you've reached out to him/her.

With much affection.
V

[crimson curls]

Last June, the two sons I placed for adoption 20 years ago sent me a letter. It was and is a jumbled mess of emotions surrounding the situation. We will soon be meeting each other for the first time since I signed away my rights as their mother. As you said, if you have not been there, it is too hard to describe with words. I wish you peace of mind as you decide what the next step will be for you.

[Sailor]

Hugs for you CG, that is indeed deep. I'm glad you're sharing with your therapist- keep your perspective in your usual admirable way.

Dave

[George]

Oh man ... you have a lot on your plate right now Chelsea. I cannot imagine how difficult this can be as I never had to live that way. Nobody can suggest which way to go as that is something only you can decide, what is right for you.

Be well, good lady.

[Alana]

Hey CG,

When I was twenty-one, so long time ago, I sought my biological mother out who'd abandoned my father and I. At the time, I was three. Her abandonment sent my father into a tail-spin of alcoholism and major depression. He contemplated suicide more than once but didn't go through with it because he didn't want me, and then later my younger brother and I, to wake to his dead body, brains on the wall, etc. My father made mistakes but abandoning us too wasn't one of them, and so I'm grateful he didn't leave us too.

Which isn't to say my relationship with him was cheery. In every man I attempt a relationship with is the detached angry father I never managed to impress as a girl or young woman. I think now, that I'm forty and a single mom and a MFA grad, he's impressed. Of course, I don't have to live with him now.

Perhaps what I mean to say is I understand what a Daddy means to a girl. Yes. I love him, yet when I was seventeen I told my father I hated him and often wished him dead. Really.

Meanwhile, I'd managed to romanticize my missing biological mother to the extreme and often entertained terrible fantasies in which my monstrous cruel asshole-of-a-father chased her away from me. There was no way I'd never not try and find her. No way. I was possessed with a flamey passion to find and love my beautiful mother.

So I found her.

Nineteen years later I never speak to her. I haven't seen her in almost six years. I'd rather my son didn't have to deal with her inability to remain honest or steadfast about anything. She's a flake, a liar, very-very mentally ill. I suppose my ugliest fear is I could end up like her, become her. Weak, insincere, unfulfilled.

So I live my life in spite of her, if that makes sense. Like, I'd abandon my own kid over my dead body. I'd have to be dead to leave him. Know what I mean?

I haven't managed to forgive my biological mother for not being the woman I needed her to be. She simply IS NOT THAT WOMAN. I mean I accept it, but I still suffer an engrained pain about it. Like, why couldn't she be healthy and sane and love me? Because she's not capable.

So, CG, I'm further down the spectrum of things than you are. I've had my person-to-person meetings with the parent who left me; we've exchanged letters, etc. And now, there is just answers to a few things. Meeting her helped me understand my father better, and helped me better understand the tumultuous relationship he had with my stepmom for many years. And also, there are ghosts we never see or put a name to, things that undermine our emotional health, and at least in meeting my biological mother I know what one ghost is, which makes it easier to cope with . . . and, I guess, keep at bay.

Love,
A

[rupert]

wow, big things alright. life altering, I wont say changing because however you grasp the situation will affect what happens now. all the best with it all.

Rups

[Eamon]

Gee, that's big news.

I don't know what to say to you. Other than, how could you not want to find him? It goes way beyond curiosity...

I mean, you can go on and speculate about how it's going to turn out, i.e. for good or for bad, making you (in the balance) happier or more anguished in the end, but I can't see anyone saying "why did you bother to look for him?"

I wish you the best with this new development (which sounds like an understatement).

[Juno Henry]

Chelsea... wow. Holy fuck-me-slowly.

Forgive my inarticulacy. I'm drawing blanks at every turn here. All i want to say is "good luck, and I'm thinking of you", and that's the only way i can think of to say it, in light of the hugeness of your news.

But i mean it really sincerely. Hope that helps. Or, at the very least, cheers.

Warmest --
Juno x

[VJ]

I've been absent from these precincts for a bit, but this was big news. Not big happy news, but news just the same. I mean what are the odds here of him finding you? Just amazing, really. I'd take it real slow & gradual. You're right, he's never going to be the daddy you needed & deeply desired for years. He's just not. He's got some answers that might be useful to know, health history perhaps, and some limited knowledge of 'who, what, when& where', but beyond that it's still a crapshoot & a mystery. Therapy is always a help, but with ghosts, we all need something a bit more reassuring. Here's hoping it comes out OK in the short run, because that's about as far as anyone might guess here. The pain from abandonment never truly ends, and there's not much he or you might do to paper that trauma over. (Not that you could or would want to). Here's wishing you the best of luck on the journey. At a bare minimum everyone deserves better from a parent, mental illness notwithstanding. That might not be an especially auspicious start though, right? I'd ask the hippy about it all too. Just for a start. Cheers & Good Luck! 'VJ'

[efg]

Breath... just breath.

[Z]

This post speaks to my worst fears. My daughter has spoken to her father on the phone (several years ago), but never met him. She was unimpressed by what he revealed of himself, and his attitude to me, and appears to barely think of him. She seems happy, and able to rationalise and express her feelings about her fatherless state, but I'm always afraid that there is something waiting to surface. I hope not: he and I split up before she was born, so she seems to have no conscious sense of abandonment, and she says she considers that any paternal lack is made up for in her relationship with her grandfather, to whom she is very close. I hope it's enough.

I wish you good luck, and hope that things work out in a way that you can live with happily.

[t'Sade]

That was cool. Just this weekend, I decided to look up my own grandmother who I haven't talked to in ten years. Much of the same thing.

[Vanessa]

Wow, Chelsea Girl, this really is a life-altering moment...you're in my thoughts.

I remember what it felt like to receive that first, unexpected, heart-stopping contact with my birth father after so long.

I can't even imagine what I would have been feeling had that emotionally turbid time been complicated by the fact that I was a sex blogger. I mean, so much of THIS is related to THAT, isn't it? I totally get it. The father/lover weirdness. I GET IT. I am here if you need a private, anonymous ear.

[Tom]

Chelsea~

Do you know this passage from Rilke? I always find it comforting when I am grappling with the profound issues of my life.

"have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

sending good thoughts your way.

Tom

[Rachel]

Oh honey. I can begin to understand how you feel; my father walked away from my mother and my two brothers and I when I was 13. The hole is always there, and no matter how many times I have tried to find him and have some kind of relationship with him, the bottom line has become for me that the hole helps make me who I am. Just as the eviable peers who had two loving parents at home are who they are because of their two parents. And no matter how hard I try now, there isn't any way around the sad fact that my father isn't really someone who can have a relationship with me.
So I will think of you and wish you the strength you need to deal with this revelation, and I wish you the best possible outcome.

[The Fury]

In sheer awe. I wish you the best with this. I have a feeling it will mean less to your actual identity than to your perceived identity.

[Sarah]

Oh wow. I had no idea when I e-mailed you that you were going through something like this. I can't begin to understand what it's like, or even to write a comment that would be in any way useful or comforting. I can see from the sheer number of comments here that you have no lack of support, but I thought I'd add my voice to the fray - thinking of you and wishing you the best. :)

[tom paine]

I can't really talk about the connection I have to your situation except to say that it's very similar on certain levels, and I can only wish you the very best in sorting it all out. Good luck with it. Really. On a certain level, you're very lucky, and some adoptees spend their lives searching for this closure and never achieve it.

[Artfuldodger]

My heart and my thoughts are with you on this journey CG. Any other words would be silly considering, just know and take care. virtual hugs have been lobbed in your direction.

[Indy]

you know, even other people who go through abandonment, separation, loss can not know how you feel...exactly. every situation is more unique than a fingerprint. that said, it is nice to know that you're not alone, not crazy in your reactions or unreasonable with your heart. there's no right way to do it - the flooding will happen. if not today, tomorrow. it's up to you how much the answers matter - how much you let the past weigh you.

yes, i was adopted. and i have had a great life. beyond comprehension as to how, i located my bio mom--international tv in brasil 7 years ago. still, when i tell people about the story, it often feels like i'm telling someone else's story.

in addition, i lost my adoptive mom. i mourned them both at much different points in my life. can't help but connect that i found one as the other was getting ready to go...

then, just this past weekend, i met face-to-face, my bio dad. my fantasies growing up were more focused on my bio mom, but since she i met her the desire to seek him engulfed me.

i can't help but feel a bit freaked out at the parallel of timing. i know i don't know you, but if you want to chat offline, i'm here.

cheers to you and your heart,
indy