Was I wrong to contact my father out of the blue after 38 years?

• A question about contacting a long-lost parent, and the complications that can arise when and if you do. Adoption is not involved in this particular case, but there is, of course, This is very long, for which I apologize in advance. Also, some of you will know who I am because of some things about this situation which I've written in private venues elsewhere. I hope you will honor my request to keep the people involved with this story anonymous on this very popular public forum. My father and his wife were married 52 years ago. I am 38. You can do the math. My father and my mother were together for some amount of time in the late 1960’s (probably about a year) while my father was separated from his wife. (This whole story is a big secret and neither my mother nor my grandparents ever really discussed it with me, so I'm putting together a lot of clues here, but don't have much detail.) Shortly after I was born, my mother moved to another state to live with her parents. My father vanishes from the photos in my childhood photo album when I'm about four months old. I believe that he returned to his wife and other children at that time. At least one of his other children -- my half-sister K -- knows that I exist. She lives on the other side of the country and I have met and spoken with her several times. It seems as though one condition of my father returning to his family (or, I guess, his "other" family) was that neither my mother nor I would ever be spoken of again. I have never spoken to my father, or gotten an card or letter from him, or had him communicate directly with me in any way. He provided no financial support to my mother that I'm aware of. He just -- vanished. When I was about five, my mother changed my name and her own, and there is some question as to whether or not the sole copy of my birth certificate that I have available has my correct year of birth on it. Its possible she was trying to 'hide' me, but since we never moved I think its more likley that she was trying to give us both a fresh start. My entire growing up, I believed that my parents were divorced, although I don't actually recall anyone telling me that, or, in fact, ever discussing my father in any way at all. When I was in grade school I would make up stories about him -- that he had died in Vietnam, that he was a secret agent, -- when other kids asked why I didn't seem to have a dad. I had a very, very dim memory of my Grandmother showing me a photo (perhaps that came with a Christmas card?) and telling me that the people in the photo were my brothers and sisters, but I was never able to make any sense out of that memory. My grandparents have both passed away, and I have not been able to speak about any of this directly with my mother. She simply refuses to talk about it. "It was not because of you" is all that she will ever say. When I was in my early 20s, my half-sister contacted me (her then-husband was adopted and had found his birth parents, which made her want to try and locate me), and shared with me the part that I did not know: namely that my father and his wife had been married in 1954, and that they already had three children when my father met my mother, and that they had never divorced. I was in contact with K (my half-sister) for about two years and then she got a divorce and moved and we fell out of touch. Honestly, while I've always wondered how things go to this state of affairs (so to speak), my father has never been even in the top 100 of the things that I think about on a daily basis. I grew up with a wonderful strong mother and loving and warm grandparents as caregivers, and I wanted for nothing. ** ten years pass ** While I was pregnant with my son, I began to review what I knew about my father, mainly prompted by an increasingly strong desire to obtain his medical history as part of the genetic screening we went through before the baby was born. After our son was born, and we were looking at my baby pictures to try and determine if he looked more like me or like his father, I turned the whole situation in my head over even more. Looked at it from a lot of different angles. Then, a little more than a week ago, I wrote a short, fairly generic note on a card, enclosed a photo of the baby and a copy of the birth announcement that was in the newspaper, and mailed it off. My father has a very unusual first and last name, and using Google and Superpages I got his address in under five minutes. I didn’t write "Hi Dad" or anything of that sort - I tried very hard to keep the note short and very generic ("Thought you might want to know that our son, [son's name here], was born on [date]. He's a happy, healthy little guy who brings us joy every single day. Everyone here is well and happy and I hope that you and your family are well also. [signed, me]") In fact, since my last name is now different (as is my mother's), and sons last name is also different from either of ours, if you didn't have my first name, my mother's first name, and knew what state we lived in - or even if you did – it might take you a minute to figure out who this card was from. I’d never attempted to contact my father before, although I had toyed with the idea many times. I can’t say for sure what prompted me to try and contact him now. Perhaps its just the hormones. : - ) I don’t want anything from him. I’m not even sure that I’d know what to say to him if I met him. Part of me really doesn’t need to know anything else about a man who could simply turn his back on his four month old child and walk away forever. Certainly having this baby in our lives now cements for me how difficult that would be. But another part of me feels like this has all been a big unspoken secret for far too long – nearly 40 years, after all – and that this man, whomever he is, had the right to know that he had a grandson. After all, my mother is 72 and my father is somewhat older than that (I believe he is about 75 or so.) Perhaps he has reached the point in his life where he wants to tie up loose ends, and perhaps sending him this one photo would give him permission to do that, if he wished to. Or, perhaps it would just make him happy to know that we are happy and healthy and he’d never do anything about it. Or, maybe he’d just throw it away – or his wife would open it and she’d throw it away and he would never see it. Suffice to say that many possible scenarios ran through my mind. But it seemed like someone, sometime, had to take the first step. On Tuesday, I got a voice mail message from K, which I would characterize as “trying not to sound upset”. In a nutshell, she said that her father was out of town, her mother had opened the card, and that her mother is elderly and frail and that her mother had been “very upset” by the card – had called K crying and it had made her relive a very bad time in her life, etcetera etcetera, and would I please call K back. I got the impression that K was asked to somehow reassure her mother that my father and I had not been secretly in contact for years. I did call her, got her voice mail, and left a very neutral message (“Hi, got your message, Sorry I couldn’t answer when you called. Feel free to call me anytime. I’ll try to call again another time.”). She then called me back again twice, once leaving a very short (18 second) message and the second time a longer message much in the same tone as the original one – my parents are both elderly and frail, this has upset my mother terribly, my mother opens all the mail that comes to the house, etcetera etcetera, and would I please call her back. So, this afternoon I called her again. Got her voicemail again. Left a somewhat longer message more or less recapping what I said above -- assure your mother that I’m not going to turn up on their doorstep demanding money or anything else. I’m sorry I upset her. No one is under any obligation to do anything here. I simply felt that my father was entitled to know that he had a grandson, that perhaps he would like to know that. As you say, they are getting older, and some people feel the need to tie up the loose ends of their life. If your father wants to do that, he’s welcome to, but its not something I need him to do. Nice to hear from you, and I look forward to speaking with you “live” soon. And that’s where we sit. But, as you can imagine, I’ve spent the better part of several days second guessing my decision. I did do it as a sort of spur-of-the-moment thing, but only in that I’d been turning it over in the back of my mind for months, but suddenly saw a card in the drugstore and thought “I’ll buy that and send that note off today”. Did I do right here? Wrong? Am I the bad guy? Do questions such as right and wrong even matter in a situation like this? After all, its been nearly 40 years, years where many people have lied about many things, both to themselves and other people. On the one hand, its silly and it seems to me the lying needs to end sometime. Its kind of uncomfortable being someone else’s dirty family secret. When our son comes to that point in second or third grade that I did, where he’s asked to draw up a family tree, I’d like to be able to tell him something more about his Grandfather than I was able to say. Plus, the small, spiteful part of me thinks ‘what right does this woman have to be this upset?’ – after all, she won. She somehow, using love or threats, convinced my father that walking away from his child was the right thing to do, and kept him with her for all these years. What threat can I possibly pose now? (I suppose she thinks I want their money, but I swear to you that is the furthest thing from my mind.) On the other hand, K is pretty clearly upset that I sent the card, and I kind of feel bad that I have caused this little old lady (somebody’s mom!) whom I don’t know from Adam such distress. K even seems to imply in her second message that her mother is quite ill and that she’s afraid all this stress will cause her some kind of “setback”. And I do feel slightly guilty about that. Then there is a tiny little part of me that wonders - Was her mother really all that upset? Or is it K that’s actually the one who is really upset, since to this point she’s always been the only “little girl” in her father’s life? But that’s a bit too soap opera for me…. Right now my next step is do nothing. I’ve still not spoken to K “live” and I suspect that we’ll trade voice mails a couple more times, or that I’ll get to speak with her live at some point and be politely made to feel guilty for this thing that I’ve done. That’s fine, she’s very protective of her parents and that is her right. I really have no intention of contacting my father again, but will certainly speak with him if he chooses to contact me. I’m not quite sure how to end this, except to say that I guess I’m soliciting feedback from you all – sort of using you as a kind of social norms sounding board. I’m not looking for anyone to be “at fault” here, but rather trying to find out how people with a range of family experiences other than my own would process all this.

• Answer:

  Secrecy is fundamentally crazy. Denial of reality is fundamentally crazy. Refusing to discuss a subject in an adult manner, again, fundamentally crazy. I don't know who you hangout with progosk, but honesty, integrity and forthrightness... kind of basic in the world of the sane. A parent has obligations to a child which are not bound by time.