Dear Dad: Letters to a Father I Never Knew

A personal journey from grief to recovery

Dear Dad:

The birth of James is the second defining moment of my life.  My own fatherhood provides the occasion and opportunity to overcome the pain of your loss.  I now live outside of myself, for another, and can commit myself to encouraging his promise in ways that never where available to me.

Now it is James who brings me to tears — not out of regret for the losses in my life, but for the joy he brings to my life, and for the hope he brings to all who were dead inside and in need of resurrection.  For now I know, it was not you I wanted to bring back from the dead, but me.

I am alive, and I rejoice at my rebirth!

Dear Dad:

We are told that the adoption may take a year and a half.  It takes about 6 months.  After four months we learn that a mother has chosen us, and two months later we fly to Missouri to meet the birth parents a pick up the child.  He is three days old and exactly as we dreamed: healthy, beautiful, smart.  We call him James, a strong name, a regal name, my son’s name.

Dear Dad,

Adopting a child had always been my first choice.  Discouraged by the cost and ineffectiveness of the fertility treatments, we are now ready to follow through with it.  We go to our local police department to be finger printed and meet many times with a social worker, who certifies our “worthiness” as a couple. We retain an agency in the mid-West and prepare a personal statement and photograph.  Then, there is the most difficult part of all — the questionnaire on which we state our preferences for a child.  We dream, of course, for a perfect child — healthy, beautiful, smart.  But the reality of choosing is very different than that.  We must decide what medical disorders to accept in the child, and what life style characteristics to accept in the parents.  Are felons acceptable?  What about drug abusing parents?  Are multi-racial parents an option?  We mark our preferences and hope for the best.

Dear Dad,

No matter how hard we tried, we were not successful.  L. did not get pregnant.  Sex for procreation was no fun –with the pressure to perform, the prescribed positions, the predetermined times.  No matter — we got nowhere with it and decided to try fertility treatments.  At great personal expense, and without insurance benefits, we entered treatment.  I stick L. with needles in her fleshy backside every month and we hope for the eggs to multiply.  They do.  After super-powering the sperm, the medical experts eject it into her, and we hope for the sperm to penetrate.  They don’t.  Exhausted and financially sapped, we plan to adopt.

Dear Dad,

I have lived a lifetime assuming I would have no children.  In fact, I gave the notion little thought.  It is true, when my students would ask if I liked children, I responded with the old W. C. Fields line, “Yes, well done.”  But I said it for the shock value, and I didn’t so much hate children as was indifferent towards them.

Today L. declared she wanted children.  No, ‘want’ is too mild a word.  She had to have children, she needed them, and I had to be the father. Her clock was ticking, etc.  I reminded her that we married on an agreement that we would be childless.  “Besides,” I reasoned, “ I’ve had a vasectomy.”  “Then have it reversed,” I was told.

Doctor Taylor is an excellent surgeon.  Still, success rates are not great for a reversal after ten years of a vasectomy.  I vomit for 24 hours after the procedure.  My testicles are like bruised oranges.  “Give it a couple weeks and then masturbate to clean out the pipes.”  When I ejaculate, it feels as though my insides are going to split apart.  But miraculously, I remain intact.  Soon after, “You’re shooting with live bullets,” the doctor says.  A mixed blessing.

Dear Dad,

Do you remember our birthday parties, Mom cutting the cake and you behind the movie camera recording the arrivals and festivities?  All the cousins were there: playing games, opening presents, dancing in the basement.  How curious that of the closest cohort of cousins — five in all — none has children.  Three are married, two are single, one is gay. Not only are there no children, there appears to be no desire to have children.  What forces were at work in our family to negate the instinct for having children, and effectively to end the family lineage?

Dear Dad,

L. and I agreed that our marriage will be childless.  “Voluntarily childless couple,” is the sociological term. I feel so strongly about it that I go to a doctor and have a vasectomy.  Sitting in his office, he says, “I usually don’t perform vasectomies on men who have no children. Only on those who already have children and want no more”  “A vasectomy is forever,” he warns.  “It cannot be reversed.”  “I know,” I answer confidently.

I watch the entire procedure with complete composure, so sure I am of my decision.  In fact, I am delighted with my choice.  Ever since I got C. pregnant, I am terrified that it will happen again: another unwanted child, another abortion.  After the vasectomy, I am free to ejaculate, guiltlessly and fearlessly.  I remember the teacher in a college Human Sexuality course.  “My vasectomy has made a vas deferens in my life,” he joked.  A corny joke, but a true one.  The vasectomy makes a vast difference, not so much in my sex life but in my mental health.

Dear Dad:

Since my series of panic attacks, my body chemistry has changed.  I am easily embarrassed and I cry at the drop of a hat!

The embarrassment is much reduced now, but was fierce for years after the initial episode and often occurred in class when a student would ask a question to which I didn’t know the answer.  There were actually occasions, more than just a few, when I had to rush out of class, faking a coughing fit, to escape the intense feeling of exposure.

The crying remains and comes less out of hurt or fear than in response to “touching” moments in, for example, the narrative of a book or movie.  What is such a moment for me?  It is often when a young person shines in front of an admiring audience; when a young gymnast wins the Olympic medal; when the young activist stands up against injustice.  These accomplishments often move me to tears and I often wonder why.

Here are three guesses:

1.     The young star who brings me to tears is the child I hoped to become and

never did;

2.     The young star embodies my dreams for Emma, my unborn child;

3.     The young star is my brother, whose talent and promise far exceeded my own.

Dear Dad,

Her name would have been Emma — my dead child — after Emma Goldman, idol of the anarchist movement.  Tough and resourceful, iconoclastic and radical, Goldman was a heroine of our college years.  My Emma would have been graduating from college about now.  This is I think the greatest regret of my life, the abortion of my child.  In my mind and heart, I am pro- choice, an advocate of the right to abortion for those who wish to choose it.  But in my soul, I will forever regret our own choice, or, more precisely, my assent to C’s choice, to have the abortion.  My child, my love — you are my second murder.  I grieve deeply your loss.

Dear Dad,

With the rest cure a failure, I finally see a psychiatrist, who offers a choice of either drug therapy or a talking cure.  I take both.  My primary physician prescribes Xanax, an anti-anxiety medicine. With it I am able to get through the day, and sleep at night.  I also begin bi-weekly sessions with a psychotherapist who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.  L. is hurt that I never talk to her about my troubles.  But it is a private battle I fight, with my own past and my own mind.

“Talking cure” is a misnomer in my case.  We talk very little.  Mostly I cry.  I cry the tears of the child who lost his father and never properly grieved.  I cry for the guilt I felt at being responsible for your death.  I cry the tears of the little boy who feels so completely alone, lost with no one to turn to.  I cry the tears of the young man who took liberties with a girl and never asked for forgiveness.  I cry the tears of the man who fathered a child and agreed to have it aborted.  I cry a hundred thousand tears.  How could I have done those things?  I murdered my father! I destroyed someone’s innocence!  I killed my very own child!  There is much work to do if I am to be healed.