As an Adult… Who Was Once the Child

One of the things that I don’t often bring up, or admittedly even often associate with my ‘crusade’ to gather community around long distance parenting, is that I was once the child of an estranged parent. From 5ish to 12ish, my father wasn’t around. My sister and I were raised to believe that he was a lot of horrible things and that we should be afraid of him. Our family of three hid from him.

When I was 12, he found us. I still remember the first phone call I had with him. I remember what he sent us for Christmas that year. I went to stay with him for 6 months… and then, when I was 15, I went to live with him.

By that time, I wasn’t looking for a father. I was pretty well grown up. And by that time, the opportunity for him to learn to be a father was passed. We awkwardly played at the father/daughter roles, I finished the growing up and moved out and eventually moved across the country, keeping my father in my life as a fixture… a person who was in my life but who I wasn’t quite sure what to do with.

But as those years passed, it began to become clear to me that the story my mother had given me all of those years, about my father, wasn’t the whole story. Despite her story, what I eventually ascertained to be the actual story was that they were… (More)