What is your name? Who is your mother? Who is your father? Where are you from? Where did you grow up?
To many people reading this, these questions are nothing more than innocent icebreakers. A way to get to know someone on at least a surface level. A means to somehow connect with a person with relevant real pieces of their past. Yet these very questions are those that threw a young me into turmoil every time I was asked these questions. Because like so many kids I was forced to deal with the fallout of the sins of my mother and father. However unlike many of them, because my parents never dealt with it, it forced me as a child up into my middle age to deal with it over and over again. Even today at 51 years of age, I hate to be asked those questions.
I have been told that I should never tell this story. My story. A very integral part of who I am and where I come from. Of what I have dealt with, overcome and still struggle with. Something that causes me to not ever celebrate Mother's or Father's day personally, even as I try in my own feeble fumbling way to teach my children to celebrate their mother. Because to openly tell my story would cause unnecessary hurt on others. It would be drama. It would be messy. That it would shatter their perceptions of people, of heroes, and of a bygone era.
Honestly the whole story is too much for a blog and much more fit for a book. Each chapter unfolding new twists and turns. Perhaps one day I will write it and leave it to be read at the end of my life. My only purpose in writing this is to set my personal record straight. No aim to hurt or destroy anyone, which is why I am not putting names out. Most of that elder generation has died, People who know me personally from my youth will get it, if they ever read it.
I was born as what the old folks would say, the illegitimate son of a pastor and a church musician. I am the product of either a fifteen year affair with a view towards marriage or a long term pastor/member friend with benefits package, Depending on whose side you listen to and choose to believe. I have heard several stories from several sides. That in and of itself is one thing that could fill a book all by itself.
As my mother got closer to her delivery date of February 1964, she traveled South to spend time with a girlfriend in Virginia. I was born a month early in a strange city. A city that I never knew until my 30's. To this day people don't get how I was born in one state yet raised several states away unless I tell them this part of my story. Unlike today a woman did not have to put a father's name on the birth certificate, even if she knew who it was. It also had the effect of creating a cover story that someone else could be my father, which was not part of the plan, but the way it was talked about by people who were grasping at straws, not wanting to believe the ugly church rumors.
Initially my mother tried to force my father to deal with me. To deal with us. Mutual arrangements were made for her to have a home in another community far away from the church, away from the drama of it all. Closer to her job and with good money support for me. This would allow him to attempt to salvage the pastor church relationship. She did this for awhile but then refused, saying she if she could not have him, then she wanted to be with her family and her home. This was her way to force him to put up with what she said he promised her or shut up. He left, moved away and re-established himself. This then left my mother with an unwanted baby at 40 years of age, no husband to show for her dalliance and a life essentially in ruins.
It was at this point (I learned as an adult) that she tried to give me away to my babysitter in the new city. She would leave me constantly for days on end without ever coming by to check on me or even call her. She would always blame her long work hours, being so early in the morning to get to work or so late in the evening as to why she didn't call or come by. Finally the babysitter brought me to her and my grandparents home and told her that she had to raise me herself. According to one of my aunts many people didn't even know if she had been pregnant because she was such a small woman. Now she had to deal with me. Publicly. The rumor was now very much a reality.
I can't tell you how many times I wished the babysitter would of just kept me.
From my youth up I was told - no commanded - to never tell anyone who my father was. As early as 6 years old I was told a number in another state that I could always reach him if I needed him. That I was to memorize that number and not tell a soul. I had my own baby blue Ma Bell phone in room that I constantly dialed the number on and hung up before it ever connected. I still have that number memorized to this day.
As I got older I was told to keep silence because it would bring shame to him. That it would destroy him. That it would destroy his legacy in town, and potentially destroy him where he was now pastoring. In her mind it would destroy any chance she had of winning him back. Yet no one ever seemed to care what it was doing to destroy me. The fights I had because my mother was called a whore to my face. The questions being thrown at me about my daddy by those elders who knew but since they couldn't get an answer out of my mother of my father chose to involve me in their drama parade. How do you respectfully tell those who are your elders "that is none of your business?" The constantly being picked on because I had no daddy. The dynamic of being told to knowingly lie about my father was the second biggest thing to destroy my childhood. To be told to lie by those who served in the church. The biggest dynamic was being forced to live in the same city/town where it all took place. It was because we could not move or afford to move. She chose that route to punish him, when all it did was kill me.
My mother due to this new life challenge began to drink excessively, above and beyond her previous levels. She drank to mask the pain she felt. Where it had always been a social thing before, it became very pronounced the older I got. Whenever she saw me, she saw him and I got whupped more times for stuff I did not do than for stuff I ever did. Verbal and physical abuse became the norm. The only escape was to run away - which I did several times - or to go to my cousins house. Which I am sure I worried their nerves more than anything. Until I left home at 15 for a season and for good at 17,my life was a hell of someone else's making. .
It was only recently did I find out through some people that know my father that her drinking was the main reason he did not want to be with her. The other was that she tried to force his hand, which he never appreciated. The fact that she returned to town with his baby in tow, destroyed any level of relationship they may of had for many years. That she was a messy woman struck a deep chord within me. As stubborn as she was, she was not intentionally trying to be messy. Yet through many of her choices, that is what it looked like to outsiders. Dealing with uncomfortable truths, life really does become messy.
As I have gotten older and as I have served in the church...a church I never wanted to be a part of because of the pain of my family past, I have seen many things that has clarified many of the stories that I have been told, letters I read and conversations that I have had with both my mother and my father. I have understood the challenges they faced, they drama they went thru and the heartache it caused. I have forgiven both for what they knowingly did and for the emotional, relational and social damage that they had no idea that they caused.
Yet I still deal with those questions. I get asked them all the time. Rarely do I return home for this very reason. I meet people all the time that are from my home church, home community or from his new city. I meet fellow preachers that always want to know if I come from a preaching family. I hear of his other childrens accomplishments and have even seen them at conferences yet I can't say a mumbling word, because I am sure that like me they too have painful memories of the past as their lives were also torn apart. To them I do not exist at all, while I have known their names and faces from my youth up. Or I meet people that know people that know him. I get asked if he as ever helped me in the ministry, get a church, etc. And while he has preached for me, I have never preached for him.
I never expect anything more than the limited acknowledgement more than what he as given me. While he has never denied me in writing, on phone or to my face - and I did give him that right several times and offer of a blood test, I know this is something he will never tell his children, his church family, etc. If he proceeds me in death, I will only find out via internet and google.
It was the death of a minister at home that knew all of this, that prompted me to write this morning. I found out he died via the internet.
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