Fathers

This coming Sunday is Father’s Day, a joyous day for some, a complicated, difficult day for others, so let me tell you about the fathers I have known. I’ve already written about my adoptive dad. In a nutshell, he was an avid sailor, an engineer, and a good daddy. You can read another blog about him entitled “My Captain” by clicking here. But only recently have I learned what I missed by not living with my biological father. 

First, some background. My bio dad never married my mother, so I was born a lovechild, the euphemism for illegitimate offspring. I was placed in a foster home the day I left the hospital, and there I stayed until adopted nine months later. I can’t recall being told I was adopted; it was simply something I knew about myself from the first. When I was ten, my adoptive mom added these few facts. My bio mother was petite like me and from old New England stock. As a child, she sounded more like a Campbell’s Soup flavor than a mom. Stock was the stuff my adoptive mom made from boiling down chicken carcasses and beef bones. My dad, I was told, was Irish Catholic and strawberry blonde like me. What did he look like? Robert Redford as a priest?

As I got older, I was told my parents were college students at a New England university. She was a sophomore music major, he a senior engineering student. As a college student myself, I did my birthday math, figuring I was the product of a spring fling just prior to his graduation. Therefore, my birth mother must have found out she was pregnant after his graduation. If it hadn’t been for birth control, I could have been in the same predicament. Did my father even know I existed? Was that the reason they were never married? I suppose I was trying to let them both off the hook.  

Much later, I learned this detail, they met at a college dance. She was beautiful. He was handsome and a member of the glee club. I imagined a gregarious guy who swooned her on the dance floor. Then together, under an enchanted, starlit sky, they strolled across a wide, green lawn, until ensconced under a tree, fragrant with spring, he leaned in for a steamy kiss that resulted in me. A portion of my dream conception proved true, but there was also a darker reality.

After my adoptive parents had died, my husband urged me to find my biological parents before they too were gone. I wrote each a letter requesting a response. My mother replied. My father, silence. However, in searching for my father’s address, my husband stumbled upon an online real estate listing of his home, so I had a virtual tour of the home of a father I never met. Interestingly, there was a sailboat in the driveway.

A decade later, I discovered one of my paternal half-brothers who informed me gently that our father was abusive, ending with, “You drew the long straw.”

I also met one of my paternal half-sisters who added our dad was a voracious reader, a man of constant projects, and, literally a rocket scientist, who built both a chicken coop in her childhood backyard and that sailboat I saw in the driveway of his retirement home.   

You’d think it would bother me that my bio dad was abusive, but it doesn’t. I suppose because I never really knew him, so he couldn’t hurt me body or soul except through his rejection. I grieve greatly, however, for my half-siblings because I have a growing relationship with them, and I see the wounds our father left in their lives. And I grieve for you too, dear readers, if your father hurt you in any way.

All to say, there’s a vast expanse between knowing about someone and knowing them personally.

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

So, let me tell you about my ultimate father, God. I grew up knowing all sorts of stories about him, but we’d never actually met. Not until a crisis in my own marriage revealed that in some part, I was like my biological dad who cruelly abused the affections of those he should have loved best. 

Ironically, it wasn’t until I came face to face with the fact that I was ready to meet my legitimate need for love and worth in an illegitimate way that I came face to face with God, as both my judge and defender, the almighty ruler of heaven and earth and his vulnerable manifestation executed naked on a cross for my indefensible faults.

Photo by Kjartan Einarsson on Unsplash

That’s when my meaning of lovechild was rewritten. I was not the euphemism for a misbegotten bastard, but a precious child conceived, and reclaimed by a heavenly father who loved me too much to let me go—at any price. That’s amazing grace, God’s rocket science, or as my brother and sister might say, drawing the longest straw.

And that’s my hope for you, dear reader, on this complicated Father’s day, that you would meet God face to face, and experience what it is to be His lovechild.

 “In the same way, we can see and understand only a little about God now, as if we were peering at his reflection in a poor mirror; but someday we are going to see him in his completeness, face-to-face. Now all that I know is hazy and blurred, but then I will see everything clearly, just as clearly as God sees into my heart right now.”

1 Corinthians 13:12 (TLB)

Copyright Ann C. Averill 2023

Cover photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash