Dweller Contribution: Invisible Wolfman writes...

I Am Your Father..



You know, there comes a time in everyone's life that something unexpectedly changes. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad but sometimes it just defies gravity. The latter applies to me at the moment, and just like Superman I feel like I can fly fast enough to spin the world backwards in time just before that quake started. Why?

After 27 years, I can finally say I have a father.

No, you read it correctly. 27 years. Let me let you in a bit on my secret origins. I was born in 1977 to my parents, and at the time they couldn't have been happier to have me in their lives. This would prove to be short lived, as my mother and father would break up by the time I was two. With the social climate the way it was back then, the father rarely (usually only by the slightest miracle) ever got custody of a child / children. As I grew up, I heard things about him. And they weren't good. To boot, I was saddled with the memory of someone wearing a mustache burning a cigarette into both of my hands when I was barely old enough to stand on my own. And that was a more pleasant memory when compared to the other things I was told he had done. Needless to say, after so long of hearing these things it became easier to believe that he was "more machine than man. Twisted and evil."

I spoke to him once in 1986. He had called to see if I had gotten the Castle Greyskull playset for my He-Man figures. I told him yes and then told him who it was from. He then said "No. I got it for you. May I speak to your mother, please?" She showed me a picture of him later on after he got off the phone. There he was, on a park bench in Chicago wearing sunglasses and a mustache. To me, it was an awful reminder of the scars on my hands and an unfortunate confirmation my mother was right. And so the hate I had for him quadrupled immediately and there it festered like an open wound until recent.

After so many years of not knowing and uncertainty, especially after the untimely death of my mother in 2002, I decided that I MUST face the facts and get a hold of him. I followed a few of the clues I had and my wife & I hit the internet search engines. Her persistence paid off, and we narrowed it down to a few areas close enough to our clues. We also checked in with the high school where my dad graduated and discovered he had a few relatives still living there in the local town. After two phone calls, I got his number.

And damned if he wasn't home the first time.

I finally got him on the phone and he about cried. I stayed tough, but only because I had to get to the bottom of the horrible things my mother accused him of. I let him talk things out, and he was able to let me know many things that my mother had only told part of. His side allowed me to understand the other half of those things. Suddenly it was like I had a glass of water in my hands and I had turned it upside down but the water was still holding in place. However, there was still one question that I had for my father and it was designed to point out if he was lying to me or not about these terrible accusations he denied doing. And it was so simple of a question that he'd never notice if I slipped it in at the right moment (which I did). That question was:

When did you grow your mustache?

His answer came as a relief. After 27 years of horrible lies, sleepless nights, countless hours of self-doubting and uncertainty as well as a lack of a true father/son relation ship…I finally can say I have a father. The weight of the years lifted away and I'm just so glad to finally have him back into my life. I'm flying him out to visit me during the Christmas time. What the future holds, no one truly knows. All I can say is that from here, I can see for miles and miles………