You’re A God – Vertical Horizon
my story goes like this:
my grandparents had two kids, Dean and Debbie. when Debbie was 19 she got pregnant with me. i was born in july of ‘86 and i was a month premature. Debbie didn’t know she was pregnant until she started having contractions because 1) she was a bigger girl and didn’t gain all the much weight (i was 7lbs when i was born) and 2) she never stopped having her periods. anyways, when she was 20 and i was 10 months old, she died in a car accident. she’d been drinking, had dropped her friend off and was on her way home when she crashed, killing herself instantly. they think she was reaching down to get something she dropped. at that point, my grandparents adopted me and have been my parents my whole life.
i grew up with love all around me and with my real family. i have some of the best parents you could ask for and i’ve known this story for my whole life. my mom used to tell it to my grade school teachers when i started class. it’s not something i would really cry or get sad about, especially when i was younger. it’s always been apart of my life and always will be. it was harder to deal with/talk about when i got to college for some reason. its like the older i got, the more i missed Debbie.
during my junior year of college i took a shakespeare class with miss lorelle browning. she’s a beautiful soul. after class one day i somehow got into a coversation with her about my real mom and biological father. i ended up crying and realized that i’d never really examined my feelings towards my biological father.
here is what i knew about him prior to a few months ago:
-his name was john
-he was tall
-my mom met him at college
-he never wanted to see me
-he didn’t believe he was the father
-his mom came to see me in the hospital
i think i was angry (and maybe still am) and i felt like he wronged Debbie. i got a sense of that from my mom. after about the 3rd grade, i never really wanted to meet him. someday i wanted to see a picture of him because i was curious, and who wouldn’t be? and up until a few months ago this is all i ever knew or wanted to know about him. but one night in late september my mom and i decided to try and find a picture of him. after perusing many people finder sites and facebook, we found who we thought he might be as well as his mom—pat. so i sent off a facebook message to his mom asking her some questions to figure out if these were the right people (my mom apparently had a last name—thaggard). a few days went by and i was back up in portland looking for a job. then i received a reply message from pat and later that day we facebook chatted for hours and she told me tons of information about her and her family and john and apologized for his actions. when i make it back to montana, i would like to meet her.
john also contacted my family. but not me, and not my mom. he apparently looked for other family members of mine on facebook and contacted my aunt linda. she then called my mom and that set off an exchange of emails between my mom and john. these emails were hard for my mom because of the tone of john’s emails and some additional information we found out about. after and exchange of about 7 or so emails, my mom decided to no longer have contact with john because it was too difficult for her. at that time i didn’t want to speak with john just yet because i was in the middle of looking for a job and living out of suitcase in my boyfriend’s apartment and life was up in air. when i searched john and his mother out, i never expected a response and that was probably naïve of me. i probably wasn’t ready for a response. but that doesn’t matter now. not too long after the cease and desist between my mom and john, john made a facebook profile specifically for me. he put pictures up and in the little info part below your photo on the left it says: “LeAnna, I hope someday you will communicate with me.” his statuses on this profile have to do with me and a couple of them have been along the lines of “sitting around and waiting,” “a test of patience?,” etc. those kinds of statuses irked me, miffed me, ruffled my feathers. not really sure why. in my head, i understand that i contacted him, and that i said i talk to him when i was ready, and that i probably wasn’t ready in the amount of time he’d like me to be. i get that. but i was also trying to find a job, trying to find a place to live, switching jobs, moving in, getting settled in portland and talking with my biological father seemed too time consuming—both literally and emotionally.
i decided that once i was settled, i would reach out. that’s what i did last week. i worked on a message to send him and went through a few drafts. i mean, it’s a little weird to write: “Hello biological father, this is the daughter you’re not sure is yours and i’m just writing to say hi! let’s be friends!” i mean, come on. just applying the words father and daughter to my relationship with john feels VERY strange and not quite right to me. he’s still not sure he’s my father and wants a paternity test. which i’ll be ok with eventually. just not right now. i’d like to get to know him a bit before i go there.
i mean, what if we don’t click on any level at all and possibly don’t even like each other? would it still be worth it to try, to get the paternity test, to try and awkwardly fit into each other’s lives even if it’s in the smallest way? i feel like i opened a can of worms and don’t know what to do if it all goes wrong.
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