BioDad. The Man, The Myth, The Surprise

I’ve held off writing this one for more than a month because … it hurts.

For Father’s Day, I posted a tribute to my father, Richard Noakes, who adopted me shortly after marrying my mom. I was six, and he’s the father I know and love. A BUNCH.

A few days later, and entirely unrelated to that blog, I got a Facebook message from a complete stranger. She is my biological half-sister, and she wanted to make contact with the “big sister” she’d heard about her whole life.

My first reaction, once I realized who was writing to me, was puzzlement.

What could this woman want from me at this point in our middle age? She said she’d understand if I just wanted to ignore her message, that she wouldn’t bother me again, and I was tempted to leave it at that.

There was too much water under my bridge to give me any room to float a relationship with “those people.”

Both my parents were dead and it seemed inappropriate, somehow, for me to suddenly go looking for the birth father who had severed his parental rights. It felt disloyal to my own parents, even though they were long past being affected by anything on this earthly plane.

And there was my younger sister Tracie. We were born from the same womb, and share the same mother’s blood. We grew up together, and together we shouldered the anguish of watching both our parents leave this world. Nobody else on this planet has the same kinship with me that she has, and never will.

But the gal who wrote to me seemed very friendly, very cool, very nice.

So I sent a polite reply and WHAM! We were trading messages like they were going out of style. We were becoming pen pals despite my “better judgment,” swapping stories about our day-to-day lives, our interests, and our work. It was … pleasant.

I wasn’t all that surprised. I already knew a little bit about her from talking with my mom’s cousin about 20 years ago, and I knew we had many similarities. Like me, she writes the way she talks, like someone born and bred in the Midwest. She was bright in school, loves to read, loves to write, and ran a coffeehouse at the same time I was running mine.

So I kept answering her messages. But then she tried to tell me I might want to meet the man Tracie calls my “BioDad,” and I became exasperated and resentful. I told her that the man she knew and the one I knew were lifetimes apart. I allowed as how I’d like to know more about our mutual grandma, but I wasn’t going to go much further than that.

Then BioDad’s wife wrote, and oh! She wanted me to know that there was a lot about my mother’s and (biological) father’s marriage and divorce that I didn’t know, since I’d been so young.

I wasn’t buying it.

But I didn’t want to write anything that would reflect poorly on the way Mom and Dad raised me, so I remained civil, challenged remarks that I felt warranted it, and soon found that this…this…WOMAN who was married to BioDad was becoming, if not my friend, then at least a friendly acquaintance.

And then—you guessed it—a letter arrived in the mailbox. From BioDad. Dear Jesus.

Ah, but I had that curiosity thing goin’ on. I left the post office and went straight to lunch, where I had to read this missive in full view of strangers. No reactions allowed.

He’d sent me a letter about his tractor. He didn’t want to write anything so personal that it would “scare me away.”

God help me, I wrote back. Equally polite, equally noncommittal, equally curious.

My letter no sooner got to his mailbox than he was at his table, crafting his reply.

He’s pretty careful not to step anywhere near the toes that form my defensive line. He’s offered to tell me more about the Cherokee woman who escaped the Trail of Tears and is my great (or great-great—I’m not sure which) grandmother. And he says I’m also a blood relation to a past POTUS.

Tracie and I have discussed the revelations that BioDad’s wife and daughter have shared about my biological background. We talk about what I’m getting out of these exchanges, what I’m giving in return. Tracie found out Elvis Presley’s mom had the same last name, and now she’s hoping that I may turn out to be a blood relative to Elvis, in which case she thinks a meeting is in order, and she’s volunteered to drive. I think she’s kidding.

As for me, I’m surprised and bemused. I still don’t want to disrespect my own parents’ memories, and I don’t want to give this man a pass for all the pain I saw in Mom’s eyes when she talked about him.

But it’s been 53 years since we parted ways, and I’m curious.

And it seems that we do have something to offer each other, this mystery man and I, even at this late date and with half a nation to separate us.

He likes to write and receive letters, real letters, sent through the mails and containing all the starts and stops and rephrasings that go along with them, especially since they’re penned by a stranger who draws from him half of her DNA. I think he wants to know that I’m OK, and that the first child he fathered bears him no ill will.

And me? I want to know about the other half of my genealogy, and come to terms with the realization that maybe, when he was 26 years old, he really didn’t understand what it meant to sign those legal papers that said I wasn’t his daughter any more, and didn’t know that he was drawing a question mark that would punctuate both our lives for more than five decades.

I like to imagine that Mom and Dad would understand.