February 21, 2025
I guess I first realized my family was different in preschool. I have an early memory of not being able to talk my way out of a mandatory Father’s Day craft. I made a card for my uncle and slipped it in the trash.
It was a time (the early 1990s) and a place (suburban Dayton, Ohio) where single motherhood came with a sort of baggage, though I didn’t realize it until much later. As far as I was concerned, my mom and I were a team. I liked our little family.
But sometimes it was awkward. Like the time my Girl Scout troop had a father-daughter dance and I was the only one who didn’t go.
I did indulge myself in fantasy on occasion, especially when I saw families on TV or in the movies. I thought it would be nice in theory if my mom fell in love again. Maybe she’d even give me a sibling.
Instead, when I was 8 years old, she brought home Dave.
Where do I even start with Dave?
Dave was an objectively nice guy, albeit weird. Not exactly a critical thinker. He lived in the same house his entire life.
He did things like chart the Powerball numbers every day for years, because he thought he could eventually crack the pattern and win big. My mom didn’t seem to mind at first.
Dave was raised a devout Catholic and almost became a priest but then for reasons I never quite understood, joined a cult instead. He also thought the government faked the moon landing.
He constantly ordered shit off of infomercials. He listened to AM talk radio and furiously took notes in a composition notebook. When he filled up a notebook, he’d stash it with his other notebooks and start a new one. I never saw him reference the notebooks for anything. They just sat.
Dave was not exactly a candidate for the TV show Hoarders, but I believe he would have gotten there eventually if we hadn’t moved in when we did. My mom tried to clean up the house in phases over the span of a decade, and eventually rented two gigantic dumpsters to haul away all the junk in the attic and basement. It barely made a dent.
I resented Dave. I resented him for splitting my mom’s attention, for not being smart enough for her, for moving us half an hour up the interstate to a farm on the edge of a town I’d never heard of.
I am scowling in the pictures from their wedding, partially due to the fact that I had walking pneumonia and didn’t know it. But I was also pissed off. As far as I was concerned, Dave was ruining my life.
My biological father was an alcoholic. He hit my mom while she was pregnant with me. I’ve known both those things as far back as I can remember. From an early age, I understood it was better that he wasn’t around.
Even so, I was still curious. He was half of me, after all. Sometimes I’d look in the mirror and wonder which pieces were him.
My mom told me small details over the years. She said he was a beautiful writer. She said he loved the outdoors. She said she thought he drank to drown out the mental illness that he refused to face or get treated.
I’d go through phases where I’d get really excited about the prospect of tracking him down, especially during the period in high school when I thought I’d be a documentary filmmaker. I imagined our reunion. I imagined him happy.
But I was also a realist. Even if he’d gotten sober at some point, the relapse rate is high for addicts. What if I tracked him down and he was just an old drunk? What if he never thought about me? What if he didn’t care?
In the end I never made much of a focused effort to find him, beyond the occasional Google of his name and some guesses at a location. I wasn’t even sure what I could do beyond that. Finding the right Steve Brown in an ocean of Steve Browns seemed impossible.
And then one day there he was.
My mom and Dave were married for 16 years, which was about 10 years too long. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly their relationship started to deteriorate, but it accelerated when I left for college.
My mom got bored in small-town Ohio. She got bored with Dave, and sick of his idiosyncrasies. She developed an open contempt for him. It hung thick in the air when I came home to visit. They started sleeping in separate bedrooms. He started watching Fox News.
She finally taught him how to access the internet, and the man immediately fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. One day in 2015 she went through his internet history and found he’d been on Stormfront, and that was it. (We are Jewish, by the way.)
She packed all the shit she could fit in her car and moved into the living room of my one bedroom apartment in Columbus, leaving behind almost everything she’d saved from my childhood and half a dozen semi-feral cats.
Their divorce was needlessly contentious. Neither of them had money, really. But I guess someone got in Dave’s ear that my mom might try to take everything he had, which was mostly just that piece of shit house (estimated Zillow value: $48,300). In turn my mom worried that Dave might try to take the small amount she had saved for retirement.
I felt more grief about it than I expected.
As my mom hardened toward Dave, I’d actually softened a little. I’d gained the kind of perspective you can only really get through time and distance.
Yeah, he wasn’t who I would have chosen to marry my mom, but he always supported me. He came to every single one of my high school softball games. He wasn’t exactly a father figure, but he’d become family. And I only had to see him at holidays, so his weird shit didn’t faze me as much.
My mom was a mess. She was 65 years old and soon-to-be twice divorced. She wanted to find her own apartment but hadn’t yet needed to apartment hunt in the internet era. She was in an unfamiliar city where the only person she knew was me. And she was drinking a lot of Jim Beam.
I was 26 years old and single, and my mom was cramping my style. So I moved out. I sublet my apartment to my mom and found a new one.
I pushed the grief down and moved forward. Besides, what did I have to grieve? I didn’t even like the guy.
My biological father died in August 2019 at age 66, at his home in a mining town called Cannelton, West Virginia. He was preceded in death by his father, who went to work in the mines at age 13, fought in WWII, came home, lost both hands in a mining accident, found Jesus, got sober, and became a preacher.
My father dodged the mines, but not the other family tradition. Near the end he was “sick” according to my Aunt Linda, which I’m pretty sure is a polite way to say he was shitfaced until the day he died.
I have an Aunt Linda, by the way. I tracked her down in 2018, shortly after I found my father.
By then I was still doing a periodic Google search of my father’s name, maybe once or twice a year. That day, I switched up my methods a little bit. I put his full name in quotation marks and appended “West Virginia” to narrow the results. I usually searched Virginia, where he lived when he was married to my mom, but I knew he’d grown up in the holler.
The search results came back, the top result from a Facebook page called West Virginia Mugshots. And for the first time since I started searching as a child, there he was, staring back at me.
He didn’t look anything like the handful of pictures my mom kept from their time together. He was disheveled. Scraggly grey beard. Red, weather-beaten face. Glassy-eyed. Obviously drunk. Generally what I’d expected, though obviously not what I’d hoped for.
But now I knew what town he lived in, so I kept searching. Soon I found my grandfather’s obituary from 2004, which listed my grandmother and all of my aunts and uncles by name. I went to Facebook. I saw my aunts, my uncles, my cousins. I did not see my father.
I wasn’t sure how to approach. In all those years, I hadn’t thought it through that far. I couldn’t find my father’s contact information anywhere. So I sent my Aunt Linda a Facebook message.
I don’t remember what I said exactly but I know it went something like this: I’m your brother’s daughter. I don’t know if you remember me. I went to college and got married and live in California now. I am doing well. My mom is doing well. Does my father have an email address?
Aunt Linda said she’d try to get my father set up with an email account, but she made no promises. She did send my contact information along to her other siblings, and one by one I received emails from my aunts with pictures of my cousins.
It was nice to meet my extended family, but I was dying to hear from my father. I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say. Maybe that he was proud of me. Or that he was sorry. There was a part of me that wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why I wasn’t enough. Why did he choose the alcohol? Did he regret it?
None of that is realistic, but I’d been holding onto the idea that I could fix the hole inside me by finding my father. I thought not knowing was the source of all my problems. All the pieces were going to come together, finally, as soon as the paternal side of my family tree wasn’t a question mark.
A few months passed. Aunt Linda and I exchanged a few more emails, but mostly I waited to hear from my father. I figured maybe he was embarrassed that I tracked him down through his DUI arrest. Maybe he was figuring out what to say after all this time.
Then my paternal grandmother died, and two weeks later my father died too. He never did get around to writing me back.
And that, my friends, is when the grief spilled out. All of it.
Grief that I’d never meet my father, which meant I’d never get any answers. I’d never see my face in his face, or hear my voice in his voice. He would always and forever be a stranger to me.
Grief that I’d probably never speak to Dave again, which meant I’d never return to my childhood home. Never again sit in my peaceful spot along the banks of the creek that traced the edges of the cornfields that made up our yard. I’d grown to appreciate the beauty of the farm.
I cried and I cried and I cried. Frankly I was a little ashamed at how hard I was crying over a man I’d never met, and another man I didn’t like.
I found a therapist, a nice woman named Beth who I’ve been working with for almost five years now. We tackled the dad stuff early.
Eventually she helped me realize I’d set myself up for failure. There was nothing my father could have said to me that would have been a satisfying explanation for his absence. It wouldn’t have fixed all my problems.
None of it was my fault. My childhood will always be what it was. I can’t go back and change anything, but it also doesn’t have to define me. I know that now.
I have two children of my own with a very patient man who had to fight through all this baggage and then some before I’d even agree to move in with him (and when I finally did, I kept the lease on my old apartment for another six months just in case).
I never saw myself here. I thought maybe my life was destined to be a series of dysfunctional relationships. I dated a lot of men who, in retrospect, didn’t even seem to like me that much. But my mom didn’t seem to like my stepdad that much, either. So that felt normal.
Having children has been a gift on so many levels, but it’s been especially healing to build the kind of family I always wanted. I can give them things I never had. Sometimes I just sit back, watch my husband parent our kids, and feel like my heart might burst.
I thought about sending Dave a Christmas card this year, but I realized I don’t really need to know what happened to him in the Trump era. I like to remember him as he was when I knew him (a stone-cold weirdo who always supported me) and not as he probably is these days (a Nazi).
When I choose to think of my father, I don’t think of his mugshot. I think of him in the old photos my mom showed me, from the short period of time when he was committed to sobriety. He looks happy. Healthy. In love. It soothes me to know he had everything, even briefly.
I have everything too. And I’m determined not to squander it. The biggest thing I learned from my fathers is that I don’t have to be like them.
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