Dear John

In order to explain myself and my four-month absence, I feel it's necessary to share some difficult and uncomfortable truths about my past with you.

I was a neglected child. We've never talked about exactly how much so, or exactly how emotionally stunted I was as a result - nor the wounds it has left me with.

My father was openly cheating on my mother - his second wife - for the first three years of my life. What I was told were his business trips were actually him living with his girlfriend in [Boston]. My parents' marriage ultimately ended as a result of his ongoing infidelities.

My mother was completely overwhelmed and emotionally dead when I was a kid. She was totally self-absorbed in her sunbathing, exercise bike routine, scissor kicks, and homemaking - trying to compete with my father's mistress or prevent further infidelities. She was miserable and depressed privately. But publicly, she was desperately trying to maintain the facade of a perfect family.

I honestly don't have many memories of one-on-one time with my mother when I was a kid. I was usually with my best friend and next-door neighbor - Ann - or by myself. When I was with Mom I was "underfoot." I had come to associate her with routine, rules, and long periods of waiting without any activity for my father to return from his "business trips," and regular life to resume. I would ask her constantly when he'd return - perhaps even with a toy or a souvenir from whatever exotic place he'd been - which no doubt heightened her anxiety every time I asked.

Neglect aside, you can imagine what kind of values I internalized being raised by a woman with such unhealthy ideas about relationships. So unhealthy, in fact, that my mother had intentionally gone off birth control to get pregnant without my father's knowledge. My very existence was the source of my parents' problems - the reason they were "stuck" in their miserable relationship. I was an ongoing source of resentment for my father. Whether my mother did this to keep him around, to avoid the disgrace of a divorce, to perpetuate the outward appearance of a well-functioning family, or at her own mother's urging, is unclear. It's probably a mix of them all - and a lot of trauma.

My father, on the occasions he was at home, told me I was stupid and dumb. He would give me the occasional souvenir from his trips... and then break it in a rage when I was too dumb to add big numbers together or understand an analog clock. When my father was proud of me, it was for saying something smart in front of his friends - like a circus monkey. My mother has always made fun of me for a retort I developed and only use with her: "I'm not stupid, ya know."

My dad hit me, and my mother threatened it when he wasn't home. If I protested, he hit me harder. Once, I hit back - and he let me know exactly how that would be tolerated. He was a drunk. It was a running family joke that I called him out for drinking and driving after an elementary school presentation on it - when he just happened to have a Coke in his hand at the time - ridiculing me and shutting me up. Denying and avoiding any suggestion we weren't a perfect family. I heard he has been through some sort of nautical-themed sobriety program recently.

He cheated on my mom with her best friend, our next-door neighbor (my best friend Ann's mom) - and later told me about how Ann's mom rubbed her bathing-suit-clad crotch in my father's face while he was sitting on our living room sofa and everyone else was outside - which I've held a secret until now. He told me my mom's knees were "shut as tight as a bear trap" during their marriage.

To this day - 30 years later - he's being pursued by the government for back child support. Last year, he tried fraudulently impersonating my mother to have the remaining child support "forgiven." My mother has sued him at least three times to my knowledge (from public records).

He and my half-brother - whom I've only seen maybe five times in my life - burst into an uproar, right in front of me, after a joke about how my dad should have gotten his vasectomy earlier. When I told them I knew what that meant (I had learned it from a soap opera at Grandma's) they went pale.

Since I can remember, and continuing well past when he abandoned me, I had an image of my father as a brilliant [professional] guy who loved me deeply but whose life had now cast his boat against the rocky shores of misfortune. That he was out there - somewhere - barely surviving, but thinking of me. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The only thing he was running from was the child support.

When I was 23 my father seemed relieved he was finally able to share his "completely valid perspective" with me about my mother, their relationship, and their unsatisfying sex life - now that I could finally understand his sexual urges. That, perhaps, understanding this might make our whole troublesome past disappear in a poof with a revelation bestowed upon me by a phallic-shaped magic wand. That I could see him for what he really was; a dashing, smooth-talking man, who women threw themselves at - stuck with "a bitch who wouldn't put out." Who wouldn't admire that? Who couldn't understand that? His actions had been rationally informed. No accountability needed. I never once got an apology or any meaningful sign of remorse from him.

He directly acknowledged he never wanted me, and he was living within a 15-minute drive of my half-brother. That was the last time I saw him. Only the second time since I was 11.

My ideal of my father had shattered. My entire mental schema of my place in this world was fundamentally altered. The good memories I had of him - the conference trinkets he'd bring back that surely didn't cost him anything or even require he go out of his way to procure - suddenly felt like his attempts to keep his "bitch wife" off his back.

I'm an only child (obviously - one mistake is enough). I learned quickly not to be (more of) a problem. That my feelings, my needs, didn't matter. Friends came first, sunbathing came first, expeditions to mistresses came first, even guests came first.

For me to be loved I had to either not be a problem - at least - or, ideally, make my parents look good in front of others - especially at dinner parties - where we had a secret phrase ("FHB" - Family Hold Back) which was my mother's way of telling me to stop eating - so that we had enough food for the guests - without running out, and without embarrassing the family. I was to be cute, but not seen or heard unless it was for a performance that made my parents look good.

Whenever my mother is feeling particularly emotional and reflective, she keeps bringing up the same story, with tears in her eyes, as if she's making a plea for forgiveness, but can't quite get it all out - about how one day I'd almost hung myself on a curtain drawstring that had blown its way into my crib. As the story goes, my parents came running in from the outside just in time to save me. It never made sense to me why she kept bringing this up. Eventually I started to raise an eyebrow and dismiss it as one of those things she's just irrationally hung up on.

But then I started to wonder: how could a little baby being strangled possibly warn their parents, who were outside, in any meaningful way? The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I became. How long was I left unattended? Was it just neglect - or had their marriage and my existence become so burdensome that, for a moment, my parents hesitated to save me?