Father's Day, or Days With and Without Fathers

My mom and I moved into a new home in Hollywood, Florida in 1972 sometime before my 5th birthday. Dad stayed where he was, and eventually remarried. When I was 7, he took me to Disney World for Christmas, then to DC, and finally to Maryland where I saw snow for the first time. It was years before I learned mom had not been told we were leaving the state that Christmas.

Father's Day is just about two weeks before my birthday, and Dad's birthday is just three weeks before Christmas, so phone calls to wish him a good day usually turned into conversations about what I wanted for my special day. I once sent him a Father's Day card with a letter telling him about my church and listing the Bible verses I was learning about how much God the Father loves us. I made good grades in school, was active in church and Girl Scouts, made the all-stars in softball; I had a good life, whether I knew it then or not.

Dad came to my high-school graduation, and the county paper ran a front-page photo the next day of him kissing me in celebration. That caused a problem in an already-deep rift: Mom had been the "parent" for 12 years, yet Dad "gets the credit." Over the years, I'd tried to learn what had caused my parents' divorce, but never got a straight answer from either parent.

For university, I was 10 hours away by car from Dad's home (the same house he'd had since my parents were first married). Email--the entire internet--wasn't yet a twinkle in AlGore's eye, so communication wasn't always easy. We talked less and less. Eventually I was so afraid that Dad wouldn't come to my college graduation that I didn't invite him until 48 hours before the ceremony. (It was then MY fault he didn't come; warped logic, but somehow seemed safer.)

That was 1989. By 1993, the infrequent phone calls and non-existent letters had completely stopped. I called his last-known employer and managed to leave a "Merry Christmas" voice mail on a machine I wasn't even sure was his. About a month later, a disjointed letter arrived with a "last will and testament"; seems he was afraid I might get cheated out of what was "mine" when he divorced the lady he'd married in 1973. Then, nothing. Cards sent to my childhood home were returned unopened. The phone number I'd successfully used once was now out of service.

In 1997, I returned to graduate school and the internet was the new technology teachers could use to help their kids succeed. I used it to search for my dad, without much success. In 1999, when I earned my Master's, I tried a promising-looking address for the graduation invitation, but it was returned by the post office.

After a few years away from God and from church, I returned to a realization that God loved me and cared for me every day, and that I needed to love Him in return; my situation with my dad was not indicative of how God the Father felt about me. After some therapy to work through issues of all sorts, I wrote a Father's Day song and performed it at church. It was written from the perspective of a little girl. Sadly, most of the words are lost, but the chorus went like this:

And today, I want to show you, Daddy
I can catch a ball.
I've learned a lot in school,
I'm still not really tall.
There's lots I wish that I could say
If only you would call:
Today, I miss you most of all.

From 1993 to 2003: 10 years of silence, which had been preceded by 5 years of very little interaction; 15 years without Dad. I knew from a search of the Social Security database that Dad had not died, but that was all I knew. I'd looked for property records online, tried whitepages.com...nothing. I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding him. In December 2003, a friend suggested I search the FAA's database for information. My dad had been a pilot when I was little. Lo and behold, there was an address. I sent a Christmas card. Nothing.

March 17, 2004: I went to my mailbox and found something besides junk mail. The return address was that which I had used for the Christmas card 3 months earlier. The handwriting was Dad's. He gave me his email and asked if I'd send my phone number. We talked three days later: he'd retired, moved to Peru, remarried, and only came to the US once per year to visit his brother, renew his pilot's licenses, and file his taxes. He'd had no idea how to find me, and had given up hope. The address I'd found online was his brother's, but no matter: I'd found Dad.

Father's Day 2004 was our first "together" (though only on the phone) in more than 15 years. He couldn't come for my birthday that year, but arrived a few days later. It was then I had to tell him that I would be moving to Turkey in less than two months.

Since our first reunion in 2004, we've had two Christmases and two of my birthdays together. We've not spent a Father's Day together, but I did get to see him on his birthday in 2008. Communication is still spotty: for most of our recent past, we've both spent more time out of the US than in it, and he doesn't have a phone number that I can use to call him. For reasons I don't understand, Dad still "hides" for weeks at a time without calling me, and doesn't respond to email.

I don't know if I'll even get to talk to him on this Father's Day, and I certainly won't post this on my "family" blog for him to read. I'm not into guilt trips. I did send him a picture, and yet another email, and I'm sure that he will call sometime. However, it's still true: today, I miss him most of all.

UPDATE: Dad logged in to Skype at 3 minutes after midnight my time. It was still Father's Day for him, though. Still miss him, but at least I talked to him.