Fathers

What would I say to the man?

I never met you. You were twenty when I was conceived, married to someone else. You knew about the pregnancy. And still, you walked away. You erased me before I had a name. Society helped you vanish because you were a man. You died before I ever heard your voice.

I have conversations with you in my head. Half-formed thoughts, flickers of scenes. They don’t always make sense. They come in fragments, like static. But they feel normal now. Familiar.

I imagine the setting—a quiet room, a park bench, a worn-down country pub. You’re across from me. Weathered, not cruel. Your eyes never settle. Mine don’t either.

Me: You knew. You knew I existed.

Terry: I did, Peggy told me (and then there is a pause)

Me: Why didn’t you do something?

Terry (quietly): It wasn’t simple. I was young. I was married. It was 1964.

Me: Your family acts like I’m a ghost.

Terry: Maybe I was ashamed. Maybe I thought I’d fix it later. There wasn’t a later. Maybe I never even gave you a thought!

Me: You don’t get to hide behind death. I’m still here. Trying to fill in your silence.

Each version of you plays out differently. Sometimes you apologise. Sometimes you defend yourself. Sometimes you say nothing at all. I’m the writer, the actor, and the audience of this endless play and you are somewhere off prompt.

When the scene starts now, I try to stop it. I remind myself: It’s just a thought. Just a feeling. And I look for something beautiful:Rain falling from the sky.A butcher bird I named Barry, calling from the trees.The distant sound of a dog barking into a warm night.That damn rooster that sounds so far away, yet when the wind is right, he sounds just beyond the fence.

That’s how grief works. It shifts. It changes shape. It responds to the weather.

I didn’t know I was adopted until I was twenty-one. I didn’t know details about you, Terry about you until I was fifty-five. And still, your absence reaches back, retrofitting memories that once felt whole. It doesn’t hit like a collapse. It tilts the floor gradually. And suddenly, everything’s uneven. I feel like I am walking up to that impossibly small door with the piano at the end of it from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

You start asking yourself questions you never knew existed.Who am I really?What of me was always mine?What crept in, uninvited and unnamed?

You can’t look at old photos the same.You can’t trust childhood stories.You wonder which parts were someone else’s script. I was certainly part of Mum’s whacked out screenplay of lets play narcissists and fuck everyone in the family up.

But I think about the man who raised me. My real dad in every way that mattered. He could draw, weld, build, fix, make anything from nothing. He loved me. Never once made me feel like a burden. He chose me, again. I loved him right back.

Sometimes I imagine telling you about him.

Me: The man who raised me, he lived. He gave. He showed up. He was everything a father should be. His only fault, being married to her...

Terry (staring at the ground): He sounds like a good man.

Me: He was. He is. He always will be.

When I try to your think of your voice, your laugh, your hands—I’m just guessing. My long chin reflects yours, and your mother’s, maybe your sister’s. That’s all I have. Echoes and pictures that reflect part of me. In beginning that’s all I wanted to see who I looked like. It was never about getting to know the person. But you know, you always want what you can’t have.

Then I learn fragments from others.You were the child of an affair too.Born into silence.Maybe that made you cautious.But you took your name back. Claimed it.That took guts.

Maybe that’s where I get my grit.

And I wonder how much else lives in me.The secrecy.The tension.The urge to speak, and the fear of what it might cost.

Are my scattered thoughts yours?My pacing?My endless questions?My art?My love of the underdog?

Who answers that? Who tells me which parts are mine?

Finding out later doesn’t make it easier. It makes it lonelier. There’s no bedtime story to soften it. No parent to help you make sense of it. You carry it alone.

It’s like finding a strange stone. Smooth in places, jagged in others. You turn it over in your hands. You ask if it fits into the wall of your life—or if it wrecks the foundation.

It did change everything for me.

I was relieved she wasn’t my mother. I’ve said it often. But my regret? The man who should have given me his DNA didn’t. Life stripped him of genuine fatherhood, he was doomed to take up the role of father to other men’s children, all four of us and he did it selflessly.

And still, you linger.You whisper in tree branches.You hover in half-remembered dreams.And on those days, I look at your photo—tall, dark wavy hair, holding a child like they were yours.

It looks familiar. It feels alien.

This is why I write.

To pour it out.To empty the static.To trace the patterns in my head before they tangle too tight.

This is the light I follow.Even when it’s far off, flickering in the distance.