By Kira Wang
The first time I looked up the name of my biological father, I found nothing but a Pinterest account. There were three boards on his profile: “Outside,” “Boy rooms,” and “Food.”
He was the father of at least two boys who were probably twins. He owned a dog. He wanted to know how to grow ginger indoors, and he was looking to build bunk beds for his sons.
I silently added these facts to the short list of things I knew about my father. Other facts I knew about him:
- He pursued a master’s degree in geology. It’s unclear if he finished it.
- He lived somewhere in Illinois, according to a background search I did on a free site.
- He was a Capricorn, based on his birthday, from the same background search.
- He also pursued a master’s degree in computer science. My mom helped him finish it.
- He was allergic to alcohol. (Me too, I guess I got this from him).
- He had disproportionately short legs. (I also got this from him).
- He didn’t pay child support.
- He cheated on my mom before I was born. (I am not a cheater).
- He claimed I wasn’t his biological child. (A DNA test reported otherwise).
Looking him up was—and still is—an act of masochism. It’s a reminder that I was the reason why my biological parents divorced, how I could ruin relationships even in the womb. This man had the capacity to live his white picket fence dreams with his two boys, his wife, and his dog. But when it came to his ex-wife and ex-child, he was all but dead.
I’m obviously very bitter. I’ve never been one to forgive and forget. But despite my decades-long grudge, I still embarrassingly want to know more.
When I first found out about my father, I was ten years old. I was sitting in the front seat of the car, heading somewhere that didn’t really matter. My mom and I were talking about God.
My mom didn’t believe in living with a partner before marriage, and she thought that all people should love God first, their children second, and their partner third. I told her that I would never date in middle school. At a red light, I turned and asked my uber-religious mom — who was vehemently against premarital sex — a ‘gotcha’ question.
“If you and dad got married when I was three, how was I born?”
She pulled the car over into the nearest parking lot and told me the truth.
“I don’t want you to feel any type of resentment towards him,” my mom said in Chinese. “Your dad and I love you just the same.”
Investigating my father came in spurts. I’d randomly Google him when I felt bad about myself. I snuck a look at my birth certificate to find his name. But when I turned 21, I decided that I wanted to know more about him than paperwork could tell.
At first, I requested my parents’ divorce records. But when the court reporter emailed me to confirm my request, I ignored it. She called me twice. I ignored those too, and I called my mom instead.
In all honesty, I didn’t want to call my mom.
When I was a toddler, I playfully splashed water at my mom when she was helping me shower. She instinctively splashed me back. The soapy water got in my eye, and I cried a little in response. Mom—to my surprise—started crying harder than I was. I had no idea why. “I hurt you,” she later explained.
Growing up, I started to realize that no matter the terrible hands my mom has been dealt, and no matter how terribly my biological father had treated her, the person who will hurt her the most will always be me because her love for me is unconditional. The people we love the most will inflict the most pain, whether they like it or not.
This sort of unconditional love caused me to tread so lightly to the point where talking to her about my grief became awkward and foreign. If I cry, she will cry harder—and I didn’t want her to cry. I didn’t want to hurt her even more. It felt cruel to make her relive those memories.
So I approached the subject of my father as a journalist, rather than a daughter.
I regret that immensely.
“You know, getting pregnant was actually something we agreed on,” my mom said over Zoom. She was thirteen hours ahead in China, just back from a college reunion.
And then facts just started tumbling out of my mom’s mouth. My father actually had a wife before my mom, but they divorced soon after they got married. He was easily frustrated, lost interest in things quickly, and didn’t have much patience. They were set up by my mom’s best friend. He wanted to go to Penn for grad school, and he didn’t get in. My teeth look just like his.
His Visa expired because he quit pursuing one of his four attempted master’s degrees and had no plans to continue it. So to keep him in the country, they got married.
“I wasn’t ready to get married, and I don’t think he was either,” my mom said. “But we had to do it because of that, and I was regretful.”
To me, marriage has always been a double-edged sword. I absolutely detest being alone, but I fear commitment. Almost 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce, so what’s the point of merging bank accounts if there’s only a 50% chance that your marriage won’t end in a court?
I don’t even like it when I have a crush on someone—it’s humiliating to invest so much of yourself in a person who might not even like you back. Defining a relationship isn’t a guarantee that your partner loves you as much as you love them, and it’s easier to leave rejection and heartbreak behind if you weren’t that attached to the idea of a relationship in the first place.
I begin relationships with the expectation that they will end. When men sleep over, I lie awake wondering if I’m ever going to see them again. When my friends tell me how much they love me, I question if they’re telling the truth. I can’t find joy in anything without stress taking over. I think that’s kind of sad.
My mind feels like a giant ball of rubber bands all the time. The bands are wound tautly together, squeezing tighter and tighter until I feel like I’m about to explode. I let my neuroses pile up, making the pressures of my stress and anxiety define me until I can’t take it anymore. I need to fill empty spaces with people, events, and things so I don’t have time to think.
“I feel myself always performing to fulfill people’s expectations of me,” I told my therapist. “ And I’ve been performing so long that I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
At the core of the ball of rubber bands that is my mind, I fear that there is nothing. And when I’m alone, that’s when it all hits me. I construct my identity around the distractions I’ve collected to avoid being alone. When people leave me, parts of me die because I don’t really know who I am —and I don’t think I want to.
When my mom was pregnant with me she was working a finance job in Connecticut. My father was an unemployed software engineer who lived in Chicago. He told her that he’d move to be with her and find a job there—she had the higher paying job anyways, and he wanted to be a family again.
Soon, he started putting less and less effort into his job search. My mom then found out he was having an affair with someone in Chicago. She has no idea who the other woman was, and she doesn’t care to know.
He told my mom that he made a mistake. She thought they could work things out, but he made no effort to fix any of the pre-existing problems in their relationship. My mom is forgiving, but she is not a doormat. So she filed for divorce.
The divorce proceedings were messy. The woman he cheated on my mom with was also pregnant with a son who has a birthday “very close to mine.” I had a half brother my age, confirming a fear I once thought was silly. I chose not to process that.
My mom took full custody of me and he gave away his visitation rights. During the divorce proceedings, my mom had to legally pay alimony even though she was now a single mother and he was still a scumbag.
He claimed that I wasn’t his biological daughter, so my mom took me to New York and got a DNA test. The test confirmed that I was, in fact, his daughter. When she sent the DNA test over to him, she received no response.
Since he was unemployed, he technically didn’t have to pay child support. My mom’s lawyer recommended that they ask him for one dollar every year so that once he found a job, she could ask him for more money without having to reopen the case. He never paid a cent.
We didn’t need the money. What makes me even angrier than him not paying child support is the fact that he’s still alive, caring about the kids he was ready to have and ready to love. And worst of all, he doesn’t care whether I’m dead or alive. I’m just another kid that he’s thrown into the trash can of the past. But at my core, I wished he cared — even just a little bit.
God, I wish he was fucking dead.
“Somebody could be dead to you, and you could be dead to them. But because there’s an imbalance of power, that person is hurting you,” Bea, my good friend and mentor, tells me, referring to the inherent power disparity between parent and child: “They will always find a way to rise up from the dead and make you feel worse.”
Bea, who has her own shitty father, confesses that until recently, she aspired to be just like Samantha from Sex and the City—glamorous and successful, but alone. Until she met her current boyfriend, she never thought about having her own family because her father made her feel like she didn’t deserve one.
“I got good grades. I was the best in my dance class. I was a really good kid,” Bea says. “So I was like, why does he not want to be around me? Why is he choosing other people over me, a good kid?”
Both of us agree that we don’t really know what it’s like to set boundaries. Bea had to grow up quickly to support her mom when her father left, shouldering a heavy emotional load. She was just six years old. Neither of us could choose whether our biological fathers were in or out of our lives. Neither of us were allowed to pick whether or not we knew the paternal half of our family lines.
Bea is striving to “exist on her own terms,” and I think she does so wonderfully. But even now, it’s still hard for her to set these boundaries because she isn’t used to making choices for herself.
She tells me that she used to write letters to her dad that she would never send, but soon realized that it was pointless. “If he’s not serving the purpose of a father, it hurts more to force it,” she says. Bea’s words make me realize that reaching out to someone who won’t ever care will just set me up for more disappointment. It’s better to resent him from afar than to know him up close.
It’s not abnormal to have a father who doesn’t care about whether you’re alive or dead. In fact, I’m lucky that I have a non-biological dad who does. But parts of my father hang around me like a ghost. His absence colors every inherited part of me. When I look in the mirror and see a face that doesn’t quite look like my mom’s, I know he’s haunting me.
When I feel any sort of negative emotion, my first instinct is to quit. According to my therapist, I’m so anxious to the point where I’m avoidant, and I purposely choose to chase situations that I know will fail just so I can protect myself from unexpected disappointment. I’ve skillfully conducted Irish exits so many times that friends consider my disappearance inevitable.
The temptation of quitting starts in my stomach and rises up to my throat, leaving just seconds before I have to mouth the words “I’m going to head out now.” Quit before things go wrong, and you won’t get hurt. The one thing I can definitively say I can do is quit—and I do it well.
In high school, my mom told me my father was a quitter—just like him. I laughed in response. Of course I inherited this from my fucking father. He quit when things got hard, too.
I know I’m not my father’s daughter, but I fear that biology or epigenetics or whatever scientists study may prophesy that I’ll turn out just like him. My resentment for him is so consuming that I can’t help but resent myself.
In my mind, our parasocial relationship lies in some sort of self-manufactured purgatory. He’s dead to me and also the reason I’m alive. I don’t know whether to love that he’s gone or hate that he’s not here. I don’t even know him beyond a name and a couple of facts—but that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?
My best friend of 15 years, Eden, tells me that humans are like memory foam. Every experience, no matter how meaningful or meaningless, creates a divot in the mattress of life. And if an experience presses down and creates a valley, the absence of experience is a relative peak that awkwardly juts out into empty space. But, with time, the mattress will eventually absorb the divots and spring back. A flat surface will remain.
At any given moment, I am a temporary memory foam topography of experiences and non-experiences. And when I think about my father, I’m completely consumed by my lack of experience. I mourn the opportunity to have him explain to me why I constantly catastrophize or the other half of my medical history. I grieve who I could’ve been if he didn’t leave, and I grieve the trust in people that I never had. But each day, I feel the hurt of non-experience getting smaller and smaller.
With time, my grief will turn into an acceptance of the man who has never loved me and will never change. In spite of my projected acceptance, I feel that my hurt—and my mom’s hurt—will be unforgettable.
Not having a biological father doesn’t mean that I’m not loved. I am deeply loved. But it does mean that I’m missing something.
I’m not entirely sure what that something is. The physical parts of me I know come from him when I look in the mirror, the hurt my mom and I both hold, the awareness of his absence, the questions I have that I know he’ll never answer—the awareness of him, out there, someone, somewhere, not dead, but dead to me, is what hurts the most.
The Woodlands 