Good Dads and Ghost Dads

You don't know what you got 'til it's gone...

There are so many ghost dads in my family, men who take the shape of a father somehow but never emerge fully into the light.

It’s been six years since my dad died. He was a great guy, even if he wasn’t there the way I always imagined a father should be there. He was usually floating high on weed when he spent time with us, but I look back with gratitude that he was there at all.

How is it that there are so many absent fathers in my family? I think part of it is that I come from a long line of headstrong women (a nice way of saying ballb*sters). But it’s also just the kinds of men and situations we chose. I’m not blaming the women entirely. Ultimately, it’s up to the man whether he wants to stick around or not. The good ones do. The bad ones don’t.

My dad stuck. He was uncomfortable in family situations - he preferred to be banging on the drums at a jazz club to making idle small talk about mortgages and careers. He always existed on the fringes of life, never quite becoming the man he wanted to be. He was always the sucker who fell for a scam. He never had any money and he lived with my grandma until she died then he lived in her house until he died.

But he stuck. He showed up. He was there at every Thanksgiving, every birthday, every Christmas. He would bring over bags of groceries for my daughter and me, loaves of wheat bread, hot dogs - all the things he thought we’d like from the dollar store. It’s been six years since he died and I think of him almost every day.

Most of the men in our family fathered children and then vanished. Either they left or we women left. However it shook out it always seemed to be single mothers raising babies and absent dads not living up to their responsibilities.

We can start all the way back with my mother’s mother who got pregnant some time after the US entered WWII. All we know is my mother was born in 1942 and her mother was married to a WWII vet. She would find out decades later, thanks a slurring phone call by her father’s new wife, that he was not, in fact, her bio dad. No one knows who that guy was. My grandmother had been a teenager who was pregnant and then married a man who raised my mother as his own.

Had she not been told by her drunken stepmother, she would have found out when she submitted her DNA to 23 and Me. Then it would have been the big surprise waiting for her at the end of her life.

My father was an only child raised by my grandmother who was also a single mother. My dad felt abandoned by his own dad, which is why he refused to abandon us.

My mother had my brother the same way her mother had her - knocked up as a teenager then married my dad who was supposed to raise my brother as his own. I went looking for my brother father about 20 years ago. By the time we found him, he had been dead for a year. He never had any children yet he never went looking for my brother.

All his life my brother imagined what his father might be like. He even took his name. But when he found the family, they were cold to him. They treated him like an unwanted outsider and felt threatened by him, like they thought he wanted money or something.

All of this would come crashing home for him when I put my DNA on 23 and Me and a woman popped up with a high percentage of my DNA and my mother’s DNA. Who could this person be, I wondered. I contacted her and it turned out my brother had a daughter he never knew he had.

When I met her for the first time I noticed her bright green eyes. I’d only seen those eyes once before, on myself.

My mother also has green eyes, though they aren’t quite as green as mine.

So when I saw her eyes, it was unmistakable. There they were, the same green eyes I have. I won’t post her whole picture for privacy reasons but those eyes are my eyes.

I have to conclude that these green eyes belong to my mother’s bio dad. What else could explain it? No one else in our family has them.

I have been searching on Ancestry and 23 and Me for any DNA matches on my mother’s father’s side but have so far come up empty. Maybe he died in the war. Maybe he never had kids. Who knows who he even was. All I know is that my grandmother’s pregnancy caused a scandal and supposedly the man worked on the construction site my great grandfather ran.

Because my brother never knew his father, he has welcomed his daughter into his life and now finds out he’s also a grandfather of two beautiful girls. For my brother, DNA technology has been a blessing.

When I got online in 1994 I met people from all over the world. One such person lived in Italy. I traveled there in 1997 and came back pregnant. By then, I knew I had to have the baby, even though he didn’t want me to. We fought over it and it ended our relationship.

I knew I was going to follow in my mother and grandmother’s footsteps and raise my baby as a single mother. Even though I was a Democrat and a liberal, I listened to Dr. Laura’s show every day at noon on KFI in Los Angeles. I could never tell my friends this, of course, because Dr. Laura was a Conservative. She was adamant in her advice to women: do not have children unless you are going to raise them yourself.

I took her message to heart and vowed not to spend my days away from my baby and that is how I ended up building a business online so I could stay home and raise my daughter, who is now 26.

Early on, I tried and failed to find the right man to be her father figure. Ultimately, I would follow yet more advice from Dr. Laura. It’s better to raise a child without a father than with a revolving door of men or a not so great man.

Not having a dad is a loss for any child. We can’t pretend otherwise. My daughter never had a dad to say how pretty she looked in her prom dress or teach her how to ride a bike or just to have a man hold her and make her feel safe. I had to do all those things.

I’ve had so many male friends who have felt obligated to step up and be a father figure for my daughter. One of them is one of my best friends. He never had children himself but has always been there for my daughter - at her graduation and at her birthdays. As great as it is, it’s not the same as having a father there.

Fathers build courage and strength. Fathers make children, girls especially, feel like they can trust the world. Without a father there, the world seems unpredictable because no woman, no matter how great she is as a mom, can do everything and be everything.

We seem to be living through a time where fathers aren’t as valued as they once were because men aren’t as valued as they once were. It seems to have set things off balance, like our entire country is now fatherless. We seem to be collectively craving that kind of leadership now. Just give us a good dad. He’ll make things right.

Not every dad is perfect. My dad certainly wasn’t. He did the best he could and I’ll always be appreciative that he stuck. He never left. That has to count for something.

Happy Father’s Day to all you wonderful dads out there. Wishing you the very best.

Since I grew up watching movies I’ve always loved the movie dads in some of my favorite films. It’s true when you watch them you think about how badly you’d love to have a dad like that. But now, I look at them and think about how I wish we had a culture that still valued dads like that.

Here are a few of my favorite ones.