Family Life

inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale

Breathing is such a simple act. Air in, air out. Such a simple act that insures life…gives you the chance to do it again. *shrugs* I have been weirded out for the past few days…feeling like I’m working on borrowed time. I haven’t felt this…aware of death since that terrifying car accident I was in shortly after LittleOne’s senior prom. *shrugs* I don’t know why I’m so…eerie, but I just have a weird ass feeling. Either I will get over it, or I won’t. I am assuming it is stemming from the fact that I am just, as I told my momma, feeling ‘off-kilter’. I feel fragile…like a mote in God’s eye….

Anyhow…over the weekend I straightened up my file box, and as I was going through it, I found the letter from the sperm donor. *sighs* I need to think of a better name for him…maybe I’ll just call him Ray. Anyhow…this was the letter that he wrote back to me after I broke the ice the first time and sent a letter to him. It’s odd…because I had been thinking off him on and off for the past few weeks, feeling like I should get in touch with him.

You’d suppose after 24 years I would have gotten used to the silence, but I still can’t…can’t just walk away from the silence and accept it. I have accepted that as far as true family goes, I am a child of my mother, and my mother’s mother, and of my mother’s mother’s mother. Yeah…I can count three generations of women, and not a single generation of men. My father… gone. My mother father…gone…I don’t even know if he is still alive. I doubt that my mother knows. My mother’s mother’s father…gone. I have half of a family tree…half of a history.

I vaguely remember my great grandfather…a coal black man who always smelled of pipe smoke. I had to be about 4…no older. I’m not sure what happened to him…maybe he died. My great grand mother…I remember her well. My grandfather…I met once. When I was about 15…it was a birthday for one of our ‘cousins’, and along with him I met a lot of his family…strangers all. As for my father…I met him once as well. I have aunt’s and cousins and uncles and all the like…that I will never be family to. I have a 14 year old half sister, who could slap me in the face and I wouldn’t know who she was. It’s a…interesting state to be in. Well… what all that rambling boils down to is that I am going to write Ray again…well… just a card. I…I think I am still… no..

I am still a little….ouched by the fact that he didn’t…acknowledge my graduation announcement…but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he didn’t get it. I am…bitter about the fact that after many…words of sincerity and concern, I haven’t heard from him since…my 21st birthday. A little over three years ago. And I’m trying to figure out how to put it all into one card that I am hurt and angry and sad and bitter…and that I want something from him… but I have no clue what that would make a damn bit of difference at this point in my life…and how to say all this in a way that doesn’t sound childish and doesn’t sound ragingly mad and doesn’t sound like mushed mealymouth either. Hallmark doesn’t make cards for fathers who aren’t. And then I further wonder if I even have any right…any reason to be acknowledged. I am…a 24 year old memory that has been ignored for 24 years…hell I’ll give him 21 years of forgetfulness…is there a statue of limitations on blood? Is there a time after which you should just give up and say fuck it…I don’t HAVE a paternal side? Is there a time after which a child can no longer claim anything from a … sperm donor that she never knew anyway?

Am I being a fool for even trying…and a bigger fool for even caring? Should I just suck it up, and start to believe in parthenogenesis and accept that the only closest ancestor that I have is my mother… and will always be her? *sighs* I don’t know…I feel like I am too old to be this conflicted over this. I feel like I should be ‘old’ enough to let it go…to let him go…like he did me. *sighs* And how the hell do I even try to fit all these conflicting feelings and emotions into a itty bitty hallmark card?

Stay Jazzed.