The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
“Baby Sleuth, Daddy Issues & My Single Mother” by Chloé Allyn
Before my first birthday my father decided that he didn’t want me. My mom moved back home to her mom, leaving him to himself. Life began again, without him. I rarely asked why, for fear of exposing my parent’s flaws or dredging painful memories. For most of my life, it was easy to accept that I’d be different. That, for all intents and purposes, I didn’t have a father. I’d say it to the kids at school, I’d say it to my teachers, I’d say it to the woman who helped administer my passport. No father on my birth certificate, no father at home.
It hasn’t rocked my body recently, in sobs that bowl me over, but I always carry the void at varying sizes. I’ve stopped crying for myself. Stopped looking at my balled up face in the mirror as it hits me over and over that I am fatherless. It feels adolescent to grieve so vehemently now that I nurture myself. At 24, I sustain my own life. My father sustains his life. My mother and stepfather sustain theirs. I am my own wealth of strength, my own God of forgiveness, I am a powerful woman in the same shape of a girl I was before.
I’ll say it now so that I can put it into physicality again. I am not mad. I’m not sad, lately, either. I am a survivor of loss, and a void cannot be filled but it doesn’t always blister.
~
My mother is beautiful. She gave me her youth but still celebrates mine. She supports me with no conditions; she loves me more each day if somehow that were possible. And I, am a willful woman, started as a child of dreams with a sense that the world wanted me to succeed. She believes it, she has always believed that I could do whatever I wanted. I am not missing an ounce of love or support.
My mother was sad when I was little. My mother and I spent a lot of time together in our apartment doing separate activities. Content to play in solitude while she read magazines or watched television. Sometimes she would play music very loud and sometimes she would also cry. We made plans to do things together, besides watching movies, but I remember her over-committing to me frequently. The time would come and go for her to draw with me as earlier promised, or to take me somewhere special. I came to expect little to no follow-through.
Occasionally, she would draw with me. After guilting her into using my newfangled “twistable” crayons one evening after school, she drew a picture I have yet to forget. A crowd of featureless black figures covered the page in matte wax, in the middle of them was a shining, sparkly yellow figure. The picture haunts me and I find myself still in an attempt to gauge her mindset. I want to chase the black figures away from my childhood mother. I want her to know it turns out well.
~
The absence started to hurt my feelings around 14. It was obvious something was wrong. There was something an ache to cry about. To be mad about. There parts of me that were missing. Years of listening to others tell me how I should feel caught up to me. And I felt bad.
I was getting obsessed with knowing the truth for myself. I wanted to know why he left me behind, but it terrified me to ask my mother. She’d been through it once and confessing the sins to me might make it too real for both of us. So I spent high school nights by lamplight, holed away in my room crying and writing in my journal about the general unfairness.
Maybe it would be different now, maybe he didn’t want a baby, maybe he would want a teenager. Although I see now, how many wouldn’t want either.
So I got the courage one night to look for him on Google:
Christopher Michael Allyn
Christopher Michael Allyn Half Moon Bay
Christopher Michael Allyn Boulder Colorado
Patricia Allyn Half Moon Bay
Without an end goal, I plunged into my incognito browser tab like a faux P.I. with a vengeance. I searched with all the scraps of information I could scrounge. Operating off of a name, a general age range, location guesstimates and the only two images I owned of him, I scoured every free person search website I could find. Starting with White Pages, which often yields nothing when you have little more than a name, I made my way through government sites, “free” after you provide credit card credentials sites, professional background check sites that also wanted money and anything in between, often hitting a paywall dead end. Doubling down, into the double-digit O’s of my Google search, I finally found relevant information on my estranged grandmother on a free person search site. Hazily pulling away from my computer screen fervor with a number on a scrap of paper was enough for one day.
Over the next few days, I told all my friends and my mother about the number and my plans for it. Although it didn’t matter what they felt about it because I was on a quest for myself. I remember thinking that the worst was over like congratulations were in order for finding the long-lost information with the internet.
It figures that finding the number was the easy part.
~
Pacing with nerves and excitement, the dial tone rang on my slider phone, a Samsung that had gone through drops, water and soon the first conversation with my father. I spoke first with his mother, who I do not care about and never have. Allowing her son to behave in his manner makes me distrust her. From her, I received my father’s cellphone number, which was the final door to throw open on my journey for…what exactly?
I knew as little as possible about him and my mother’s falling out. He had painted himself the villain by walking away and refusing to pay child support. My mother may have called him a few words like loser and pothead but in my mind I figured she deserved that. He was 11 years older than her when I was born. She was 25. I’d like to think people know better at that point. I told everyone that I wanted to know for myself what he was like. At 17, I fancied myself a whole person, I wanted him to take me or leave me. I thought things could be different since I wasn’t as dependent as before. We could talk about philosophy and music now that I didn’t need to be carried around in a diaper and blanket.
He was salt of the earth. He mentioned the Packers. We Facetimed, exchanged photos and made flimsy plans for a visit. I’d call him after school and 20 minutes on the line felt like an hour. He sent me $200 for my birthday and Christmas. He stopped answering calls and texts within two months. It was okay. What did we really have to talk about?
~
I want to talk again someday, I think will always want that. I tell myself now, that I started at zero, anything more is a gain. Anything lost is status quo.
I guess I can still say that I don’t have a dad, but it doesn’t ring true like it once did. I have so much now, I have a stepdad, I have myself, I have many best friends, I have boyfriends and I have the internet.
I suppose for some it’s scary how hard it has become to hide from the insurmountable collection of data. One day I too will run for cover, one day someone will show up looking for me. My heart is soft, I have nothing to hide, I’ve given all my sadness away on the internet.
