I’ve been working with some high school students, teaching them creative writing. They’ve written poems, a short story, and now they are working on some non-fiction. The exercise I’ve adopted from a colleague has them writing about their greatest fear and their happiest or most meaningful moment. I’ve adapted it somewhat so that they must include elements of a narrative. They are working more on it today, and I wanted to give them an example of how their real life can be told and still be story-like. So I wrote about a fear I have and I’m sharing it below (I’ve written about this on my blog before, so some of it may sound familiar).

I don’t know the man who is my birth father. I’ve met him, I’ve been told, but only when I was a baby and so, I have no tangible memory of it. I’ve over thirty years old and today I still fear what might happen if I were to track him down and meet him. Mostly, I fear that he wouldn’t want to know me, wouldn’t care to see me, and would reject me all over again like he did before.

I remember when I was about eleven years old we were sorting through pictures on the floor of the spare bedroom. These weren’t your average number of pictures, found in a shoe box or a few envelopes from the photo lab. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures were piled into a large cardboard box, about a foot and half wide and tall and two feet deep. There were a lot of pictures. There were five of us sitting on the thick carpet around this box—my mom, me, my friend from down the street, her older sister, and a girl from across the street who was my step-brother’s age (three years older than me). We were a group of girls and women having fun, laughing at the silly photos of my family. One photo was of my step-brother and I dressed in my grandmother’s old clothes. We both had on dresses that hung like tents from our 4 and 7-year-old bodies. We had on huge brimmed hats, and pearls and beige leather purses. He and I looked like Halloween gone awry. My step-dad never liked that picture, I assume because he didn’t like to see his young son dressed in drag.

So, there we were, all of us girls, giggling at the photos and talking and having a good time. I picked up a photo of a man and it struck me that I had to know who this person was in the photo. I asked my mom, “Who is this?” But she ignored me as everyone kept looking through the pile. “Mom, who is this?” I asked again. My mom looked up at in that certain way that said we will talk about this later. It was an unspoken command that I was out-of-bounds, even though I didn’t know why or how I could be.

Later when we were alone, my mother explained that the photo was of my natural father. She had told me at a younger age, around six, when I was confused by the fact that I had a different last name at the doctor’s office than the one I used at school. The doctor’s office knew me by my birth name, by the last name of my natural father. Everyone else knew me by my step-father’s name. At age eleven, I didn’t remember that conversation at all. And so my mom briefly explained it all to me again.

I never talked to my mom about why things happened as they did—why my birth father chose to stay away and never know me. But it was one of those things that as a child I could only rationalize as something wrong with me. I wasn’t good enough. I was the reason he left. He didn’t want me. To this day, some of that lingers, these thoughts that I was abandoned because I wasn’t good enough. They linger even though I know that it probably had more to do with other things. Perhaps it was his fear of my step-dad, who can be rather intimidating. Perhaps it had more to do with the complication of feelings he had or lacked for my mother. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that he already had a daughter who was being torn away from him in a nasty divorce. This last idea is something I learned a few years ago from my mom’s long-time friend, who knew them both way back then.

But the fear of rejection lingers. I fear that someday I’ll find him, show up at his door, and say, “Hi, I’m your daughter.” And he’ll be standing there, unwelcoming. It may be fear in his eyes that I have come, or maybe just that cold, dead look of apathy. Either way, my own fear has kept me from seeking him out. Some days I wish I could meet him easily. I wish he would find me, and tell me that he has thought about me all these years like I’ve thought about him. I often wish it could be that easy, but somehow I know it won’t be. If I ever want to know my birth father, I know I’m going to have to face up to my fear.