October 19, 2004
Baby Daddy
By Joshunda Sanders
On Father’s Day, I woke up with a heavy heart. It was as if someone had died a few days before and I had a wake to attend. Getting out of bed might have been easier if I was mourning a friend’s sudden absence and there was a place I could see the body, weep and go back to the land of living and healing. Instead, I awoke that Sunday, crying over not calling my father, knowing that he was home watching a movie or getting ready to find a bar in Southern New Jersey where he could get his mid-afternoon drink on.
What a stupid fucking holiday.
Who came up with it? What about the rest of us who just wanted the thought of our fathers gone so we wouldn’t have to obsess over them rejecting us with their disappearing acts or conditional love or gifts in lieu of understanding? I sunk down in my bed with the covers over my head, cursing the sun.
For eight years, I have battled my love/hate relationship with my father. Each time I think of our relationship, I remember what he wrote to me before the first time we met. “Time lost can never be recaptured.” We met at my high school graduation, tried to build a relationship after 17 years of distance while I was in college, and by the time I started my journalism career, he was out of my life again. He came in bearing gifts: gold earrings and a bracelet. He left the same way, leaving me a Raymond Weil watch after college graduation before he told me I was on my own.
On one hand, he wanted to embrace me like a long lost daughter; on the other, sometimes the situation was just too damn awkward for him to be bothered. He’d helped me get by and pay for books and store my stuff while my mother was looking for a more stable living situation. Before I could ask him, during my sophomore year of college, to move in with him, he offered to let me stay with him. While we lived together, he sometimes treated me like a welcome guest, and put up a picture of me on his wall next to portraits of my half-brother and sister. He cooked us dinner and showed me some of his favorite Gil Scott-Heron albums from back in the day.
Other times, he refused to invite me home for holiday breaks. If I came to his house because I had nowhere else to go, he wouldn’t speak to me for weeks at a time if he didn’t feel like it. When I graduated from college, he said four years had been enough torture for his bank account. “The ATM is closed,” he said, reminding me that I had never asked him if it was okay for the school to send tuition bills to his house. Then he stopped calling and stopped returning my letters or phone calls for two years.
Like most people, I am a strange mixture of my parents. I have my mother’s eternal optimism and goofy sense of humor; I have my dad’s cynicism and addiction to solitude. Because of the first qualities, I believed that my father’s forecast for our relationship – “Time lost cannot be recaptured”— was bullshit. I mean, yeah, he was a bear of a man with a serious attitude, but he also had a weird affection for Tweety.
If he could love a Looney Tunes character without shame, surely there was room for me, I thought. But I didn’t always make room for him easily. I needed some time to process the transition from being a fatherless child to a grown woman with a daddy. I wondered how a father would change my life and my self-esteem as a black woman who has often sought a paternal love in my romantic relationships with older men and if my dad could transform my old resentment into peace. Mostly, I just wanted proof that my father had not abandoned me as a baby because he didn’t love me, but because he wasn’t ready to be my father when I was born. He was a man with two other children from a marriage that didn’t last; a guy who had hooked up with my mother on a whim and ended up with a love child that brought back too many memories of that illicit affair.
Instead, after four years of road trips, shopping, letters and phone calls, I got some jive ass excuse for why he didn’t want to speak to me again. When I left for Texas, I put the watch he gave me in a box and left it there for years.
I called a few times, and wrote a few letters and poems and essays, but every effort seemed proof (like the watch) of my failure to make him love me with the unconditional love I expected a father to have for his daughter. From a thousand miles away, I sent him long letters thanking him for helping me get through school and introducing me to his side of the family; but I reminded him that I had mostly raised myself and I didn’t feel like I needed him as much as I wanted him in my life. He felt like I was using him as an ATM machine, which is why he didn’t want to be bothered anymore; he thought I was too stubborn and inconsiderate to be parented by anyone and that my pie-in-the-sky dream of being a writer was a ridiculous, impractical notion. “No one is born to write,” he said. “Get a real job, teaching or learning computers.”
After awhile, when he stopped picking up the phone altogether. All that was left was the letters I wrote telling him that I wanted him to know that I did struggle to love him, that I felt rejected by his inability to accept our different perspectives on life and independence and that I would repay him if it meant that we could try again and again, if necessary, to create a long-lasting father-daughter bond. He did not write me back. His silence denied me the only thing I felt like I still needed from him — closure.
And then, he called my new job in San Francisco two years ago to say, “I bet you thought I couldn’t find your black ass.” I laughed nervously at his dark humor, and we spoke briefly about the stories he’d found on the Internet. I was writing a story on deadline, so I asked him if he would call me back on my cell phone later that day.
“I don’t do cell phones,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I know where you are.”
And before I could say anything else, he hung up.
I replay the events in my head so often that I can re-tell this story the same way every time. And last Father’s Day as I sat with anger and frustration and disappointment, I was replaying them again when my mother called.
“I just called to say ‘Happy Father’s Day!’” she squealed, like it was New Year’s Eve. “I know, I know, I’m not your father. But I’m your mom and dad.”
I sat up in bed and stared through my curtains, quiet.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Okay, wish me Happy Father’s Day.”
I did, with a reluctant grin on my face.
“Don’t worry about your father, ” she said.
“He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
When I hung up, I wept for twenty minutes straight . I went digging in my storage boxes for the watch, only to find that the battery was dead. This month, I got a battery for it, even though it still seems more my father’s style than mine. That doesn’t matter as much as what it symbolizes.
Time is more important than I used to think, but it doesn’t always heal wounds like people say. Time just reconfigures pain and turns it into something else that feels like understanding, something closer to perspective – I wonder if my father would agree.
Joshunda Sanders is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle
Posted at October 19, 2004 07:34 PM