My Father's Son... Pt. 1

This one is long. So I split it up into 3 parts to make for better/easier reading. I'll post Part 1 today, and Parts 2&3 tomorrow, and Wednesday. And don't worry, unlike my other multi-parters, this one is all finished already. :p

My Father's Son...

The title of this post feels strange to me. For quite awhile now I’ve wanted to write a post on the person who I have ever held dearest to me, the person who I strive most to be like, the model I try to follow so desperately. I always figured the first post I would ever write about either of my parents, would logically be about my mother. Yet, here I find myself addressing my father. Why is this strange? Well, the simple fact is that my father and I never had any kind of relationship past roughly my turning the age of 5 (or is it 6 or 7), years old. In my mind, he simply disappeared. I had my mother. My father figure(s), were my uncles, and my mother cousins. Yet I feel compelled to write this because the more I hear about my father from my aunts, and the more I learn about him from my step-mom and my sisters, I am realizing that I am just what the title of this post says. I am his son.




Let me give a little history. To use Trini vernacular, I am a horn-chile. My father has 2 daughters with his wife, and me. I am the youngest of his children. I have very vague memories of him coming over to see my mom and me when I was very little, and even vaguer memories of being packed into the car, and my mother and I driving over to his house. But we never went inside. We would stay outside, he would come to the car to talk to my mother, he would go back inside and we would leave. I saw what seemed to be the silhouette of two young girls inside his house, but never knew who they were. Then one day, he stopped showing up, and we stopped going over. At the age of 5 you have no idea what these things mean. Even now, I don’t know what happened for him to stop seeing us, and I have never asked. All I know is that the strange man who my mother said was my “father” and who I called “Daddy” had just disappeared.



And it didn’t bother me. I had my mom, Ena (my great-aunt), Steve (my uncle), and Fitzroy and Tony (my mom’s cousins). If this concept seems strange let me explain it like this: my very good friend’s wife has a son from a previous relationship. He was about 2 when my friend started dating his mom. His mom always insisted that he called my friend by his first name. Yet when you hear him running around yelling “Nigel”, you fully understand who he is referring to, and in what capacity. In his mind he doesn’t have a daddy; he has a “Nigel”. Personally, I do not see anything wrong with that. I actually wish there was a way for him to go through life just knowing his “Nigel”, not having to deal with the reality that Nigel is not his biological dad. But I know that day will come, and I pray for them that that situation will pass smoothly. But I digress.



Anyway, my father did stay in touch for awhile. But the calls started coming with longer and longer lapses in between. He would call; I would ask when he was coming over to see me. He would promise soon. And he would not show up. The final straw was my 12th birthday. He called me. He promised me we would spend time for my birthday. We would go, us alone, pick up my gift, and spend quality time like we had not done in years. I got excited, even got dressed up. And he never showed up. Didn’t even call back. And neither did I. I wrote him off. In my mind, I did not have a father. My mom was the Virgin Mary Redux, and I was the product of immaculate conception. The only evidence that I had a living, breathing, sperm-donor, was the fact that I had 2 sisters. Other than that, fuck him (and yes I was already cussing at age 12). He didn’t care about me, so I damn sure didn’t care about him. And I continued my life like that for 10 years.