Do dads matter?

This is a question that agonizes us single mother by choice types, and it is the first thing I thought of when I considered this path.  Is it unfair, indeed, selfish, to intentionally bring a fatherless child into the world?  What if it’s a boy, who is going to teach him to be a man?  I don’t even know how to teach a little boy to pee! 

I used to be the type of judgmental bi-otch who was fond of saying things like, “I would never do that; I would never bring a child into a one parent family.  That’s just selfish.”  But then I started examining my experience with my own biological father, and I discovered the answer to the question “Do dads matter?” is, as is the answer to most questions in this morally ambiguous age, “Sometimes”.

One thing I know for sure is my father loves me.  Why?  Because he told me so.  Over and over and over again.  Oh, I haven’t seen him since 1980.  He never contributed any child support whatsoever.  He would disappear for years on end and then call me up sobbing on Thanksgiving and tell me how much he loves me.  He would send me creepy letters in his broken English on that 70s airmail onion skin paper telling me how much he loves me.  He often threatened my mother that he wanted to just show up on my doorstep one day and did she think that would be a good idea?  But he does love me.  The crazy bugger loves me, dammit.

I know very little about the man, other than what’s written on my birth certificate.  He was 24 when I was born (I KNOW!  So young…), his profession is listed as “tool and die maker”, he is from “the interior” of Brazil, he has three brothers, his mother was a witch (literally and figuratively), he taught my sister how not to “choke up” on the hammer when hammering in a nail, he was fond of loud plaid suits, he loved The Beatles, and yes, he is crazy.  A psychiatrist friend confirmed this when I showed her a DVD he’d sent me of himself making a pitch for funding for some children’s home he wanted to set up in Brazil.  She said he was definitely delusional, possibly schizophrenic.  I think he lost touch with reality long ago, if he ever had it.  He's another one for whom the crazy Christian cult we were all involved in was a perfect match.  But I digress.

I think my mother married my father because it was 1970 and she wanted a complete family for her and my sister.  She probably wanted another baby, too (she told me I was planned, and I believe this).  I think they are very similar and this is what attracted them to each other, although she has since cynically stated she’s sure he just wanted a Green Card (this is entirely possible).  Unfortunately things didn’t turn out so hot once he arrived in the States and they married.  The way she put it, he expected her to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and have a five course meal waiting on the table when he got home; he discouraged her artistic endeavors; my sister (and everyone in the family) hated him.  He was the kind of guy that when out with the extended family would sit in the corner and pout and ruin everyone’s time.  They fought.  My mother threw a chair at him.  And they divorced when I was around four.

I have very detailed memories of the brief period when they were divorced before he moved back to Brazil.  I probably went to see him at weekends; I remember staying in his crummy Boston apartment with the pipes outside the walls, sleeping on a large blue bean bag and enjoying his menagerie of pet birds.  I remember him helping me to brush my teeth and serving me spaghetti and orange juice.  I remember when I complained about always having spaghetti that he bought some frozen dinner than involved pineapple and that grossed me out (darned kids just won’t eat anything!).  My mother told me one of the main disagreements they had in their marriage is that he wanted to rock me to sleep every night on his knee and she wanted to put me in a room and shut the door and let me cry myself to sleep.  I used to think her method was correct, but lately I’ve been seeing things more his way.

So at a certain point he decided to return to Brazil and I only saw him once again, in 1980.  I have never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why he left like this and never made more than one attempt to see me; my mother was always paranoid he would kidnap me so I believe his leaving was probably the best thing for us.  When he did come to visit that one time, it was extremely tense.  I didn’t know him anymore; he was a stranger to me.  My mother, I’m sure, was in hell.  We went to dinner and I distinctly remember him reaching across the table to pull a piece of lint off my mother’s breast, and her following his hand with a look of utter disbelief on her face (oh, no he didn’t!).  I remember sitting at our apartment while my mother was on the phone in the next room, and bursting into tears because I just couldn’t take the awkwardness anymore.  He asked me what was wrong and I knew even as an eight-year-old that I’d better lie.  “I’m just so happy to see you,” I said.  Meanwhile my mother leaned in and, still on the phone, mouthed angrily to me, “Is he making you cry?”  Ah, divorce.  Good times.

After this he pretty much disappeared.  He’d send random gifts from time to time, and letters that made no sense.  He’d not call, then he’d call; we wouldn’t hear from him for years, then suddenly he’d demand to see me, RIGHT NOW.  One of my favorite (sarcasm) memories of my young life was the torment of coming home from school and hearing the buzzes and beeps of a 1970s long distance call on our archaic answering machine, followed by that familiar, English as a Second Language voice stuttering out that this is your father and I want to talk to you, etc etc.  And I would spend the rest of the night in terror, and I mean TERROR, of that phone ringing again.  Even today a phone ringing makes me jump out of my skin. I would do homework, no call.  I’d eat dinner, no call.  Finally it would be time for bed and I’d think, “well, it’s 10 o’clock, he wouldn’t call me now, he knows I have to go to school tomorrow,” and I’d think I was off the hook.  Then the phone would ring.  And I would have an extremely awkward conversation in which he told me how much he loves me, over and over again, in broken English.  Even if I hadn’t heard from him in two years, even if I hadn’t seen him in ten.  No, he loves me.  Ok.  Whatever you say.

In my adult life I managed to work out a system with him wherein we would politely correspond by mail, and he would have to agree to answer questions about his family (he would never tell me anything personal and it drove me nuts).  So I got to learn some neat things.  I found out I’m half Italian (after all, he’s not a native Brazilian, the same way I’m not “American” – his people came over from Italy to Brazil in the 1800s).  I found out about my cousins and grandparents, none of whom I will ever meet.  I mentioned once how much I love the country and animals and nature, and he sent me a really sweet book about a children’s book illustrator who chose to live on a farm in Vermont as if it’s the 1840s (yes, clothes and all – kind of a dream of mine) and he inscribed the inside cover “For Hilary, a country girl on the heart”.  So, God love him, he tried.  I just think he’s too mentally ill to be normal and react to things in a normal way.  Like all of us (even my mother), he’s doing the best he can.

So back to the issue of do dads matter.  Let me be fair and say that I know some great dads, even in my own family.  I have friends with wonderful husbands who get a kick out of parenting, who love their wives deeply, who would never hurt them.  And it truly stings when I think not only will my kid not get a “real” dad but also will have no grandparents.  But do I want my kid to know divorce and abandonment like I did?  Absolutely not.  It was gut-wrenching at least and (no doubt) contributed to my absolute failure to find a suitable mate.  I would much rather my kid know a lot of terrific men (and he/she will) than have an on-again, off-again, inconsistent crazy dad like I did.  Consistency is the key, I truly believe this.  And pretty much all of the time I was content with just my mother and never longed for a “dad” – really, much of my life I wished he’d just go away and leave me alone.

With this said I of course am not closing the door to ever meeting someone who would end up a stepdad to my kid(s).  And I also picked a “willing to be known” donor so when my kid is 18 he/she has the option of contacting the donor, which I think is great.  I hope the donor 18 years from now is willing to answer questions about his heritage and traits that will satisfy whatever needs my kid has.  I hope it’s not like the time I wrote my father a letter asking all kinds of questions about his family and he responded with a poem about a horse.