Personal History

My mother and I had an idyllic relationship when I was growing up. Ridiculously good. Something out of a storybook, but not the good, honest kind: the kind you would put down in disgust because it was too unrealistic. She was my best friend, my confidante, everything good in the world. It was just the two of us for the first fourteen years of my life, and that was all we needed. She dated, sure, had a couple of serious boyfriends, but she never let anything interfere with our relationship — something I’ve come to appreciate more and more as I’ve started my own slow crawl toward adulthood. And that didn’t change when she met Joey, when she married him, not even a few years later when they had my little sister. They became a part of our bond, rather than an interference.

What did change, though, was my perspective on fathers.

Prior to Joey, I had no real concept of fathers. My friends had them, and that was great for them, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I never saw anything better than what I had. We were a perfect team of two. But Joey and Halle — well, that made me wonder about what I’d missed out on. He’s incredible with her. He’s incredible with me, too, a wonderful addition to our family: but I didn’t get him till I was fourteen. We didn’t have memories together, a lifelong history, and suddenly that was something I craved. I didn’t even know this other half of the formula that resulted in me, knew virtually nothing about him, had never seen his face, only hints of it in my own. Joey made me crave my own father, my own history. I didn’t even want his name or money or attention, so much: I wanted his story.

I started asking questions then: for the first time wanting to know where my mother and my own father had met, where he had come from, what he looked like, if I had inherited my tastes and likes and habits (good or bad) from him. My mother’s answers were vague, barely sufficient, and she always found a way to change the subject quickly. After a few years, though, that wasn’t enough. I wanted him, or needed to know why he hadn’t wanted me.

“What does it matter if he wanted you or not? I wanted you. I should be enough for you. I used to be enough for you.” She paused. I didn’t speak. “I wanted to be enough for you.”

“Or,” I said softly, “did you want me to be enough for you?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were dark, brows knit together, lips pressed tight and thin. The face she makes when she is carefully considering the truth against the words she’d rather say. “Yes,” she said, almost a whisper, hesitant, as though she were measuring the accuracy of the words as she spoke them: “Yes. I wanted us both to be enough for each other.”

“But we weren’t, were we?”

She was slow to answer, but she was caught up, now, in her honesty. A slippery slope. “Not forever, no. Not forever. But for a while, we were. For a while we were perfect.”

Ok. I won’t argue with that.

(These speech patterns, I know I take most of them from her. My strange and pensive syntax, repetition, staccato sounds, particularly when articulating difficult words. We give each thought just a little space to breathe, test it out, once, again, see how it feels in the open air before expanding on it.)

My questions were left largely unanswered. I grew tired of asking the same ones over and over again from different angles, and gathering nothing new. She had always volunteered what information she was willing to share, and in the end, that had to do. I assembled my image of him, my vague idea of my roots, from the bits and pieces she offered on her own. He was tall, quiet, older than she — “An an old soul, like you,” she said — peaceful and spiritual, but with a penchant for adventure. They rode a motorcycle together up the California coast the summer before I was born. He was a drummer, beat out a rhythm any time his hands were free, on any surface he could find, did it unthinkingly, out of habit. He was striking, she said, handsome and exciting and new and everything her life back home was not. He was her escape, until he escaped her, or she him: I never knew whose choice their parting ways had been.