Cary’s classic column from FRIDAY, JUL 8, 2005
I fathered a child when I was a screwed-up loser and kept it secret all these years.
Dear Cary,
Boy, did I screw up.
About 13 years ago, I fell for a friend of my sister’s and got her pregnant. I was at this point in my life a loser. I had no job, no home (I was living with my father), no car, no license (never had it), no complete education, and absolutely no prospects. Her family, predictably, hated me.
After a couple months of unremitting and conflicting pressure from our families, she “realized” that I was a loser and she cut me loose. No contact, no nothing.
The last night that we ever discussed the baby was the night she gave birth. I got raving drunk and never discussed it again. My very WASP-y and remarkably repressed family followed suit (or was it I that was following suit?) Either way, the topic was off limits, that part of my brain and my heart was blocked off with yellow tape, and everyone moved on.
She married and her husband adopted the baby. I turned my life around materially and spiritually (education, wonderful wife, good job, house, etc.). I never tried to contact her or the baby. I told myself that I was only a “donor” and that I would only screw things up for her and the baby. Eventually, my wife and I bought a home not too far from my daughter and her family.
I dealt with the issue alone, fighting the late-night demons and doing everything I could to hold the situation at bay.
Years passed. A mutual friend of the family ran into the woman and told my sister that my daughter is 12 now and asking a number of questions. The resemblance is unmistakable and her parents have done a wonderful job (I am thrilled for them and her ). Faced with this, and only because I was faced with this, I decided to tell my wife about the situation.
Predictably, my wife is furious and feels (rightly) that I have violated her trust. We are just about to start a family of our own, and now everything in my life has been thrown into play. I don’t know if I would have been able to reveal this if not forced. Now that it is out in the open, the events are painful and crushing.
I’m scared, I’m confused, and I suddenly feel every bit as worthless as I felt all those years ago. I don’t think that my wife is going to leave me (we are looking into starting some kind of couples therapy), but I feel like I am still paying for not being good enough all those years ago. I am starting to get angry at those folks who are angry at me.
I have written a letter to my daughter’s mother and adoptive father, explaining where I am in my life and that we are very open to contact and a relationship, once rules and boundaries have been established; but my primary concern is my wife. I do not want to lose her (or her respect) over this.
Three days ago I had a normal life, and I feel like I am never going to have that again…
What a tangled web we weave…
Dear Tangled,
I do not think you will lose your wife over this, or that your life will fall apart. You will get into counseling and learn about family systems and the keeping of secrets. You will work out some arrangement with the family of your daughter, and your wife will look at you with unfathomable anger for an indefinite period, and if you are good and do not completely freak out, eventually the normal life you had three days ago will return. But I hope out of this comes some thinking about how you have been living and where the secrets come from and who this person was who so many years ago fathered a daughter and kept it secret from his wife. I detect in your letter perhaps a lack of empathy for your earlier incarnation, and I would like to share a little about how I, who was also a bit of a loser and somewhat out of control, have come in middle age to regard my earlier self.
It has been helpful for me to see that I did some of the things I did because I was trying to do the right thing, strange as it appeared. It has been of great help to me to realize that I have often been an innocent actor, naive and lazy and deluded but not malicious. Like you I was trying to survive. I was doing what I had to do at the time. It has been helpful in considering why certain episodes went wrong to consider what I was running from and why I kept so many secrets and why the truth seemed unsurvivable. Was there some knowledge so corrosive that the silence in our household was a kind of insulation, a balm to naked skin?
What truth was so terrible at the time that it could not be uttered in the house? That you had sex without love? Is love a pair of handcuffs that must be worn every time? Is it a sin to do something simply because you really, really want to and it feels really, really good? Was it a sin to make love to your sister’s friend? Was there no one else around who could take you by the hand and show you what you then had to do? Was this all up to you? Are you the sole perpetrator of some crime? Must you punish yourself now for rest of your life?
It has been of great help to me from time to time to conjure up this innocent being, this young boy who was simply trying to express love and wonder, and later this young man who seemed to be in trouble but was not robbing houses or hitting people on the head. I suggest you do not hate this younger man, this fuck-up, this version of yourself. I suggest, instead, that you learn to love this nasty little fuck-up that you had to leave behind. I suggest that you offer a hand of forgiveness to this nasty little fuck-up. He was a guy trying to figure it out. He was a guy trying to get along. He was a guy trying to live with whatever it was that hurt. What was it that hurt? Who ever knows what it is with a young guy that hurts so much? We don’t talk about it among ourselves, although always there will be a stoned glance or a touch between young men, high on this or that, that says I know the crazy hurting thing too, it’s a motherfucker. So you followed the trajectory of your hurting and you got drunk the night your daughter was born.
Fathers have been getting drunk and leaving town for centuries when their babies are born: In spite of our storied propensity for engendering life, we do not always welcome it when it arrives, we kind of wish it would go away, we want to be left to our tools and our greasy hands and our shade trees, our violent metal and brief explosions, our gray primer and rust, our certainty of objects. The birth of a child means more life, more crying, more questions, more hunger, more lying and walking away, more required courses, more questions we cannot answer, more tests, more tedium, more teachers, more classroom sitting, more desolate afternoons, more diapers and howling, more unbridgeable gulf, more rules, more discipline, more silence. We do not like life in a lot of ways. For some of us men we like a few books, we like a little racquetball, we like maybe a sauna and some swimming, we like a long drive down a leafy road in a good truck, but we did not sign on for the entire program and it tires us out, frankly, and after the truck is parked we just want to lie down and go to sleep, and it is like this day after day for many of us men, which is why we father kids and go off into the woods, never to speak of it again until it comes up by a careless word or two in the supermarket, and there we are again, saddled with ourselves, bending under the incomprehensible load of what we have done — given life to a child who now looks out at the world and says, I don’t know, man, what you’re all so fucked up about, this looks pretty good to me. Just wait, we say. Just wait.
What I mean is, you need to conjure up some compassion for the teenager you once were, this wayward loser without a home or a job. You need to do this in order to stop hanging your head in shame for having been simply young and confused and unsure what to do. My sense of it is that your keeping of secrets arises out of intense shame. You need to replace that shame with some compassion and respect. To do that you need to go back down some of those same old roads and find out what you were really looking for back then.
I can’t do that for you. But my guess is that you were looking for a way out of WASPish silence, the long tradition of family secrets, the code your family lived by. You were looking for a more authentic way of feeling and being. Making love and getting drunk seemed like ways to get to something real. But at the crucial moment, when your waywardness truly bore fruit, it was a forbidden fruit it bore, so you turned away in fear. You turned back to what you knew best: the keeping of secrets, the silent bearing of shame.
Now, as an adult man, it’s time to pick up where you left off. It’s time to finish what you started — not with teenage acting-out but with a sober acknowledgment that wild, untamable passions are as important to your life as oatmeal for breakfast and plenty of life insurance.
You’re married now. You’ve got a house and a job. You’re safe. It’s time to hold your head up and acknowledge who you were then and who you are now and make the best of a pretty good situation.
I hope you get a chance to tell everything. Sometimes, after a life of secrets, telling everything helps.
Women like trees, and books, and racquetball, too. Sometimes we even like to not have to be the one to wipe up the shit or the vomit at 3:00 am and then get up at 6:00 to go to work the next day. Again.
Maybe have a little compassion for the one who did the hard work you didn’t want to deal with and bore the shame you couldn’t.
The best thing you did was let the other man adopt this child. I don’t mean that to shame you. You didn’t demand rights when you didn’t want the responsibility.
You, sir, are and amazing man.
*an amazing man.
Welcome back. That was beautiful. Thank you!
In many ways I agree except – and this is a huge except – this involved someone even more vulnerable, someone even more needy. Actually, two people even more vulnerable and two people even more needy – a newborn baby and a newborn mother. Like it or not, fatherhood is a test. ‘Was this all up to you? Are you the sole perpetrator of some crime? ‘ Well, yeah. Sometimes in life it’s better to call a spade a spade. You had sex without a condom. You didn’t or wouldn’t convince your partner to have an abortion. And so … your baby was born. And you were not up to it. That’s a great big thing to deal with, forever. And not just for the letter writer, for the mother of that baby, and most of all, the child. The letter writer says the person he is most concerned about is his wife. But this shows his naivety about children and I guess, one way or another, whether he makes amends with his first born daughter or goes on to have more kids, he will learn. He is that kid’s biological father. That is a bond that is unique and it belongs all to him. And Cary, those things you write about how men feel about fatherhood – I related to every one of them except for one fact: I’m a mother. And a mother without a father to help out and give her that time off is a desperate person, and often, a failing parent. You say dad’s have been going off from time immemorial. Well, mum’s have to. But usually not physically. They do it in other ways. They’re simply not present. Or they’re on valium. Or hooked on soap operas. What I’m saying is – no one is perfect and parenting is really difficult. To leave a mother and baby in the lurch is a big thing to have done. It will have left a big impact. But it’s done now, so where to from here? Well first off it is to acknowledge what it means, most of all to that child, and that’s the person the father should be wanting the contact with. To image he can set ground rules and boundaries with a twelve year old who feels like he abandoned her when she was a baby is wishful thinking. He’ll be lucky if she lets him into her life and her heart. He’ll have to work extra hard now than he ever would have when she was a baby to win her trust. But does he even want that? Maybe the WASP-ish way is built for situations like these. Maybe having begun in silent failure is the best way forward. To say – I want nothing to do with that child. The trouble with this approach is, that any further children will wonder, if they happen to run into that child. And that first born child has a hole in their heart, a piece of the jigsaw missing that is her biological dad. So – my advice is to first of all acknowledge and explore your failure. You’re not the first dad to have failed like this and you won’t be the last. The great thing is you have been given this opportunity to heal – yourself, your story, most importantly of all, your future. Your future in the form of your first born biological child, but also your future in terms of how you will think of yourself from now on in the past. We are our grandchildren’s ancestors, and this is a powerful moment when you have the opportunity to change their story. You can learn how to make a family that doesn’t have secrets, that acknowledges when you’ve fucked up and let people down, that acknowledges when you’ve failed and done unforgivable things. You can demonstrate how someone acts now who has behaved like that in the past, and wants to change how that goes down in the future. There is real power in this – no matter how the people around you react to your efforts, you are breaking down the WASP walls and the WASP inheritance and turning it into something different. And possibly something inspiring and wonderful. It’s all about what happens from here.