The Messes We Make

Today I want to share some of the conversations with my father. Most of this happened via facebook messenger and I have saved these texts in case anything happened. Until today I have not re-read them but here we go! My reactions are in bold. 

2/25/23 in a Facebook message he said none of his grandkids are clamoring to meet him. He said a couple are “tolerant with no real interest” and the others are “ambivalent distant”. This was our first day of talking and I didn’t see red flags yet, but I will later. Our conversation this Saturday February afternoon would be one of the very few times he asked about his grandkids. 

2/26/23 I wrote a long message sharing health stuff that I experienced over the years. It seemed fitting since he’d started the previous day with health information. I told him that I’d been sick a lot as a kid, that there hadn’t been any health insurance and so I didn’t get to see a doctor unless things got really bad. Because I didn’t have a legal guardian, my grandmother always had awkward conversations at doctor’s offices. And then there was the expense, which we were living hand to mouth, and barely even that. She didn’t work until I was 6, and when she did, she barely earned enough to cover the bills. Even though she told me she remarried for money, her second husband was an alcoholic that couldn’t hold a job. To make the whole situation worse, he had his own health issues, which led to a lot of hospital bills that made her paychecks seem like a drop in the bucket of expenses. I think in some ways I wanted my father to see the mess he left behind when he walked away and started yet a third new family. 

I told him about where I went to school and my mental health struggles that began in 8th grade. I told him that high school was even worse and how my grandmother treated me - that she used me for bragging rights when I was doing well in school, that she staked her claim to martyrdom because she was raising a child no one wanted. 

This was a long message with me sharing what my life had been like after he left the first time. I wrote about college and my life after he left the second time in 2000. Girl, he didn’t want you in 1980, didn’t want you in 1999/2000, and you’re about to find out that nothing has changed. 

By the end of day 1 he had already told me that he loved me. I told him that I heard (well, saw) his words but that it might take a while for me to say it back. I haven’t read through all of the text conversations yet, but I don’t think I ever did. 

Those messages from me were around 8 am. He woke up and said “good morning” around noon. He said that his love wasn’t “dependent on [my] actions” and that he “sincerely hoped [I] would want to return his love someday”. 

I told him if he ever wanted to call or text, that would be fine. That I only had one meeting that week - I was volunteering with my kid’s online school. And I offered to share my email with him. 

He said he wanted my email, wanted pictures of me and my family. He said “I want to know you”. His actions are about to prove otherwise.

I asked if he talked to my half-sister a lot and that I wanted to get to know her too. He said they did maybe once a week if he didn’t see any Facebook posts from her, but that they had talked every day that week. He said she was curious to know me too. Her actions are already proving otherwise.

He told me that he and his second son “decided [they] didn’t like each other. He told me that he hadn’t mentioned me to his oldest son. He said my half-sister has pushed him to get to know me, that she was cautiously optimistic, but afraid I would hurt him. 

Then he said he was taking his wife to the hospital. 

I worried about liking his Facebook posts, or commenting since he hadn’t told his oldest about me. I was walking on eggshells, not wanting to cause any trouble between him, his wife, his oldest son, or my half-sister. 

Later that day, I guess he was waiting in the ER and messaging me. I asked him how he’d like to hear from me and which was best. He said Facebook messenger or WhatsApp. 

He said that being a father was very important to him. But apparently not actually all that important.

He sent me a photo of his wife in the ER. They got in around 11:30 pm and he told me about her treatment. He said that he “truly didn’t know what [he’d] do without her. [I] can’t wrap my brain around it. He said they were both on borrowed time. Sense of urgency and helplessness coming from the get-go. 

He said that shortly after they got to the hospital that she asked him when we were going to meet. At the time we were still taking pretty strong covid precautions. He said she told him that it was ok if he wanted to drive down to Charlotte to meet me. She was feeling that it was because of her that we wouldn’t meet - that I didn’t like her because she was hispanic. First, he wasn’t supposed to be driving at all with his seizure condition, not that it stopped him from doing what he wanted. Second, I didn’t give a damn that he married someone from South America or that she spoke little English. But his oldest son definitely had a problem and according to my father, my half-sister did too, at least in the beginning. I can’t tell if she made the assumption that all of his kids must think like that or if this was him being manipulative. As for meeting, I don’t think he ever brought it up. I considered meeting outdoors somewhere but I never proposed the idea.

2/27/23 - He messaged me at 12:35 pm to say that she was okay, but he wasn’t. I asked what was going on and he said “I’m supposed to die first”. I told him I might not have advice but that I could listen. We’ve been talking for two days and the conversations are already in a dark place. 

2/28/23 - I messaged him around 1 pm and he replied a little after 5 pm to say that he had been trying his “absolute best to get [his wife] to go to the ER since 10 am”. He said she was really confused and wavering back and forth about going. With her confusion, it really didn’t sound like she was in any place to make medical decisions, but I kept that opinion to myself. He said they had fought all day and he was “starting to seize”. 

3/1/23 - He messaged me around 8:30 that night to tell me he was going to bed for another 14 hours. 

3/2/23 - he messaged me at 2:31 pm to say good morning. 

He said that he couldn’t see me doing what his oldest or my half-sister had done. He said that he had blocked her until he “could take the stress”. Looking back now, I think this was him telling me that if I acted in a way he didn’t like, he would cut me off as punishment. 

3/3/23 - He said he wanted to get to know me better and we talked about gardening and how he wanted to get chickens. He sent me photos of his family bible, his garden, and of him and his wife. I shared pictures of our cat, my garden, and a blanket I’d knit. By this point, I felt like the conversations were one-sided. He’d talk and talk and talk and I was trying to share parts of myself and he wouldn’t show any interest, ask any follow-up questions, and I was already feeling like I was talking to a wall.

3/4/23 - He asked for pictures of the kids and I said I hadn’t asked him how they felt about that. He said “ to be perfectly honest with you, the thought of asking permission to share family photos with family via private mediums has never occurred to me”. At the time, that didn’t rankle me and I didn’t comment on it. Here he’s demanding photos of people that he’s never met and annoyed that I didn’t immediately comply. Photos for what, I’ll never know - he was never interested in meeting or talking to them. I don’t share photos of my kids online and haven’t since they were babies. It wasn’t a privacy concern back in those days, but more of a security concern stemming from my mother’s behavior, which I told him. 

Then we talked via video call for an hour and 53 minutes from 8:55 pm until nearly 11 pm. We didn’t talk on the phone or video often, but these late-night calls were super inconvenient timing for me and my family. We’d be getting ready for bed, I was tired, and it was nearly impossible to get a word in to wrap up the call. 

After we ended the call, I wrote some notes about what he’d talked about. He was super chatty, bordering on dominating the conversation. He told me about his time working in a prison and he was emotional about a situation that happened while he was in charge of an inmate who was getting a hip replacement. He said the doctors wanted the guy up and moving around, he refused, and my father used force to get him up. He said the guy took 3 steps and died. He was crying, which got his wife concerned about what we were discussing. She had limited English, but I told her that he was crying about something that happened while he was a prison guard. I felt awkward here because this was the most emotional he’d been - he’s crying and his wife didn’t understand and likely assumed I’d done something to cause it. 

We talked about how we liked reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King. 

He cried again and said the hardest thing he’d ever had to do was leave me. 

He said that he and my half-sister were on speaking terms again and that the drama was caused by her calling him a “little bitch” repeatedly because he wasn’t able to get his wife to go back to the ER. 

I met his wife on the video call and she seemed nice. 

After our call he apologized for crying and said that was the only time his wife had seen him cry that he couldn’t blame it on allergies. 

This is what I wrote in my entries for that day and that video call, but what I couldn’t include was so much worse. Those recollections come at the end of March when I had gotten enough information and allowed myself to see how big of a mistake I’d made.