I just found out today from my sister-in-law down south some really harrowing, horrifying news about my sperm-donor (some people call them fathers, but this one does not deserve the title). He has three sons with different women, my younger half brothers, and unlike with me, he actually had visitation with them when they were growing up. Well apparently in addition to being a wife-beating, dog-throwing cretin, he also emotionally, physically, and sexually abused my three brothers. This was shocking news, and yet not so shocking at the same time. I would like to feel hatred for him, but I think someone actually has to mean something to you in order to feel true hatred for them--and I've never felt anything for this man other than a general sense of disgust and relief that he wasn't a part of my life growing up. What I feel is a sadness for my brothers, and an amazement that four reasonably well-adjusted adults now exist, no thanks to that asshole, but thanks to their mothers and their own inner strength.
Now I see that my mother was absolutely right to cut him out of my life like a cancer when they split up. I was the reason they married, and I was 6 months old when they finally split--and he did have brief visitation with me, because, as the story goes, I would cry so much when he would come and get me that finally he just gave it up. There is also a part of the story that involves him trying to come and pick me up from my grandparents' house one last time (where my mother was living with me after the divorce), and my grandfather threatening sperm-donor with a shotgun if he ever came around me again. Now with this new information I wonder if there's a piece of the story that I don't know...harrowing thought, that. But I have always been grateful to my grandfather for doing that, way back when, and now that gratefulness is increased ten thousand fold.
Somehow the story that sperm-donor beat my mother left me still curious about this strange man who was my father, since I went through an abusive stepfather situation when I was fairly young. When I turned 18, I sought out sperm-donor out on my own, to take for myself the measure of the man. Well I took his measure pretty quickly after only a couple of visits. First I went to him and visited at his shack in Gonzales, LA--actually stayed there--he had a third wife and all three sons with him that weekend. I remember they were very sweet boys and loved me immediately. Then there was another weekend where he came and stayed with me in New Orleans, and got me drunk on purpose (I didn't drink back then and had no experience with alcohol), and laughed about it. He also made creepy comments about my body that made me uncomfortable, and smoked pot on my back porch--so I shut him out after that visit. He tried to stop by after that, left notes in my mailbox--but I did not respond. I simply let the waters close over that again.
All my life I've missed out on getting to know my grandparents, his two sisters, their children, all because the break was complete. Now, I am grateful for that, because knowing them would not have been worth it because it would have meant I would have to have seen him along the way. Now that I am older, I have made contact with the family again on my own, circumventing him completely, and I'm the better for it. I was encouraged when I found out that my sister-in-law (married to the oldest brother) felt the same way about sperm-donor, and cited evidence for keeping her children safely out of his reach. The rest of the family is still in denial about sperm-donor's behavior--they still invite him to family functions, and sweep everything under the rug. In fact, I saw him again for the first time in 17 years (an my husband met him for the first time) this past Christmas, where all four of us actually took a picture with the bastard. Little do they know that sperm-donor's oldest son (7 years my junior) has had nervous breakdowns because of memories that have been surfacing for him about what was done to him. He is seeing a shrink and is on medication to help him come to terms with the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, and the anger he should have been turning on his father, he was instead turning inward, causing him to have clinical depression. His PTSD was so bad recently that my sister-in-law's milk dried up from the stress of having to check him into a mental hospital again, so she had to bottle feed her newborn baby instead. Can you imagine?? I cannot.
Maybe once the aunts hear about this, they will realize that it is time to finally expunge sperm-donor from family functions. One would hope so anyway. But his mother, the 77-year old Japanese woman who lost her husband in the last couple of years, will likely not be able to handle this news about her only son, so they will keep it from her. It makes me wonder about my grandfather now too--did sperm-donor learn this behavior from his father, or from someone else? Jesus I hope not.
Like it or not, this man's genetic code runs in my veins. That thought disturbs the fuck out of me, now more than ever. People like him shouldn't get to propagate the next generation! He should have been put away as a sex offended years ago, if only one of his sons had spoken out (there was an incident with the second son but no charges were filed). Yet he has propagated four people, with three different women, and he's still out there, a danger and yet somehow still a magnet to women everywhere. At Christmas he joked that he thought he was going to be a father for a fifth time...and I just stared back. 'Things have come easy to me my whole life,' he said to me, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, 'women, work, children--these things just come easy to me.' And that was the end. He never asked how I was doing, or said anything whatsoever about me, even though he's seen me now at exactly two times in my life--at 18 and again at 34. Not that I expected anything, mind you--please don't think that, never think that. There are no words that can explain someone like him, there is no pity, there is just no feeling at all. The fact that the four of us are well-adjusted, strong individuals does not make up for the fact that sperm-donor is an absolute waste of carbon. He does not get credit for that.
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