Technically everyone has a father. Or as a friend of mine calls her ex, a DONOR. Technically I was formed when the sperm from the man that my mother married mixed with her unsuspecting egg (poor thing). Four and one half yers prior to that, it happened for the first time and made my brother. You’d think that the eggs would be smarter than to let any old sperm in there. Don’t they have any kind of instinct at all. Couldn’t they see that he was a bad seed giving off bad seed? The little spermys know to swim upstream so why don’t eggs know to check the ID and mental aptitude of the one guy they allow in. But I digress. I am here and my DONOR is not.
From the time I was 5 the only presense he had in our home was in the form of a check. The DONOR deserves this name from the original sperm donation and the measly child support check/donation that came each month. This money arrived only after my mother threated call her lawyer and take him to court for missed payment. He obviously did not give a crap. Visitations with him were a joke and I quickly became fed up with them and told him not to bother coming around anymore.
I will not say that my mother took the place of him or tried to be both mother and father. She was simply superstar mother, holding down the fort, putting food on the table, blowing on that scorching hot mecuricome stuff so that the scrape didn’t burn so bad. She didn’t need to make up for anything she only needed to be herself.
Because I got used to this very quickly friends with fathers seemed very odd to me. Or rather their relationship with them did. I would watch how they acted with them with wonder. “What was that like?” It was a different world from mine and I did not understand it. Through no fault of my own I did not have that person in my world.
Recently I googled my last name and what popped up? An AJC article on a Veteran’s Day parade. The DONOR, a navy vet who was in attandance, described how he now had two daughters in Iraq and he was there honoring them. WOW! That dude couldn’t even get the check in the mailbox on time and now he is honoring these two girls I have never even met??? Ain’t that a *bleep*! He could be that person to two other people and not to me and my brother? And I bet you he is probably a great father to them too. %100 great. For my brother and I he was a big fat zero. That averages out to 50, which is still a failing grade.
Maria Pinkelton 