My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

Here we are, at the end of National Poetry month and this is my last poem in the series about my father. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen to me during this month but I knew that I would be changed by the experience because that’s what writing does, it changes you. What I was hoping for was to find a way to finally heal, after all these years, and let go of any of the anger and frustration I have had at the man who was my father only in the biological sense. I’m tired of carrying all that hurt around. It’s a heavy load and it slows me down. I’ve tried to let go of it all before and never had much luck but this time, things were different. I could tell that right from the start.

I’m going to pause right now to tell you this is a longish post but I’m also going to ask you to keep on reading. I think you’ll be glad you did so when you get to the end. (Actually I will break it into two parts because it’s a long story.)

These have all been first draft poems written late at night after I’ve forced myself to sit still and quietly revisit those old hurts. I don’t have a lot of memories so as the month went on, it got a little more difficult to mine the past for new poems but somehow, every night, something bubbled up that needed remembering so it could be put to rest. I didn’t revise the poems or sit on them overnight so often, in the morning, there were mistakes in grammar, bad line breaks, even a few facts I got wrong – all stuff that needed fixing. Normally the idea that I’ve been posting poems with mistakes in them would make me cringe but this time, I was okay with it because in the writing of every poem I’ve been feeling myself heal. There’s a scar, there always will be, but I no longer feel defined by the fact that I grew up without a father. I am who I am because of the things I’ve done in my life, the choices I’ve made, and while I am far from perfect, I’m pretty happy with how I turned out.

For all of you who read and posted comments and sent me emails offering support on this emotional journey, I thank you. I could feel you all holding me up when I was trying so hard not to fall apart. And for those of you who read but didn’t comment, I could feel you there too. Really.

So here’s my final poem of the series with an afterward worthy of an after-school special movie.

FAMILY STORIES

I grew up a lonely, only child in a
neighborhood of other people’s grandparents.

Imaginary friends kept me company in my attic bedroom
except for those few weeks during summer vacation
when grandkids came to visit
up and down the street.

What I wanted as much
or maybe even more than a father
was a sense of family,
of feeling like I belonged,
a chance to find myself
in the faces of my family.

My mom and I
were the only Webbs I ever knew
and I felt the absence of that family
nearly every day.
It didn’t seem to matter to me
if they were good or bad
what mattered
was that they were someplace
that I wasn’t and for the longest time
I translated that in my mind
to mean that I was less than everyone else.

I learned to tell stories by watching television
and rewriting the endings of my favorite shows
when I was supposed to be asleep.
I’d hide under the covers
and rearrange the scenes in my head
so the star of the show had to search for someone,
a missing daughter
a missing sister
a missing someone,
who always
turned out to be me.

All I ever wanted
was to write a happy ending
to my family history.

I think I’ve finally figured out
that family stories are different for everyone
and it’s up to you to do the research
to fill in the blanks
of what you don’t know
and then rewrite your story
so it all comes out
just the way you want it to.

Who I am
is not because of him
or in spite of him.

Who I am
is because of me
because of all I have experienced
because of all I have done (and not done)
because of the choices I have made
to live the life I am living.

Who I am
just fine
just right
just who I am
supposed to be.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

This got too long so I broke the “you won’t believe this” story into another post. Read how poetry, Google, and Craigslist helped me find the family I never knew I had.

Great Kids Books has the round-up of all the Poetry Friday posts today.

And now, the rest of the story, or more specifically, how poetry, Google, and Craigslist helped me find the family I never knew I had.

In November of last year I wrote about finding my father’s obituary. It was an odd feeling to find him but to not be able to talk to him. Thanks to the Internet and Google I was able to use some of the information in the obituary to get a pretty good idea of where my aunts were living but I didn’t do anything with the information. They were old and I was scared. How do you suddenly drop into someone’s life and announce yourself as a relative? What if they yelled at me? So I decided to do nothing. I’m good at that.

Along came National Poetry Month and I had the idea to explore my relationship with my father through poetry so that I could finally make peace with it all and then move on. After I had posted the first few poems I was contacted by Diane Main, a local teacher, who had read my poems and been moved by my story. And it turned out that this teacher had a passion for something of her own, genealogical research. She offered to see what she could track down about my father’s family.

In no time at all she located my father’s half-sister living only an hour away from. She had been given up for adoption by my grandmother but had the opportunity to correspond with her mother/my grandmother, before my grandmother’s death. I sent my aunt a link to some pictures I had of my parents wedding and in the set was a picture of me as a toddler taken in front of the Christmas tree at the car dealership where my mother worked. My aunt recognized the car dealership because she had grown up her entire life living right next door to the owner! My mother, when asked, remembered my aunt’s parents but had no idea that their adopted daughter was related to me.

You can read more of Diane’s side of her research for me here.

Each night while I worked on my poems Diane worked on my family tree. She found one Webb after another. My aunts and uncles. My great grandparents. Suddenly I was surrounded by Webbs. But most of her research went backwards, toward the older and mostly dead Webbs.

That’s when I thought of those names and cities and states I read in my father’s obituary. And I finally felt brave enough to try and make contact. Thanks to Google, I found the phone number for both of my aunts. I called the one that I knew my mom had met. And yes, my heart was pounding, wondering what I was going to say. I ended up just blurting out, "My name is Susan and I’m Tommy’s daughter."

It was a wonderful conversation. She’d had some health issues so her memory wasn’t as great as I had hoped for back when my mom and her brother were married but she never once doubted me and she told me so many stories about my father’s childhood, stories that helped me make sense out of the type of person he had become. When she ran out of stories about my father I asked her about her mother, my grandmother.

She paused and then said, "Well, she loved to write poetry."

That was when I burst into tears. There is no one on my mother’s side of the family that has any inclination toward writing at all so this small piece of information touched me to the core.

The next day I was still feeling pretty brave so I called my aunt Kitty, the one mentioned in this poem. And again I was greeted with open arms. She was able to tell me even more about my grandmother and she stopped every so often to call out the name of another relative. The following day I called my father’s widow Ruth and she was able to fill in a few more pieces, but not much, about him.

Until I called them, none of these people knew about me.

Aunt Kitty gave me phone numbers for three people that, until I read the obituary, I never knew existed. My two half-brothers and my half-sister. I tried my sister first but the phone number didn’t work. Then I tried my youngest brother. She had given me his cell phone but he had recently moved and she wasn’t sure if it would still be connected. It wasn’t. But for some reason I decided to put his cell phone number into Google. I’m not sure what I was hoping for but what I got was something I didn’t expect, an ad from Craigslist. He was selling some furniture and it had has cell phone listed and another number that I assumed was the house phone. The ad was fairly recent and I knew what city he was in so I looked up the area code and added it to the house phone and hit the send button on the phone.

I think I gave him quite a shock when he answered the phone and I told him we were related.

We had a nice talk and then he gave me my sister’s phone number so I could finally talk to her. And that was the best conversation of all. We laughed. We cried. She said, "I took a nap and I was the oldest in the family and I wake up and I have an older sister." Lori and I have been piecing together our joint history. The most surprising discovery has been that her mom knew about me all my life but us kids were all kept in the dark.

Since then I’ve made contact with my other’s brother’s wife, cousins, second cousins, and a whole lot of Webbs. My brother sent me pictures of my siblings and my father’s widow and cousins have sent me pictures of my father.

Back in 2005 I wrote about a dream I had about my father and how in that dream, he gave me a gift. And now, five years later, I think I understand. It wasn’t in him to be there for me but through him I now have that family connection I’ve been searching for all my life.

All because I wrote some poems about something that mattered to me.

Poetry can change your life. No doubt about it.

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

WHAT YOU MISSED KNOWING ABOUT ME

I like meat and potatoes
better than fruits and vegetables
and I can’t stand it
when the juice from the green beans
runs into my mashed potatoes.
I used to take a paper napkin
and roll it into long, skinny tubes
that I could use to separate my food

Books were always my best friend
and I could navigate our entire house
while reading
and never run into anything.

One summer I hammered nails
into the apricot tree,
hoping it would die
so no one would ever make me try to eat one again.

School came easy for me
and teachers liked me
because I always did my homework
and volunteered to answer
even when no one else would raise their hand.

Even though I was short
I ran the hurdles on the track team
and I ran fast.

I got booed
when I tried out
for chorus
and the school play
and the fashion show.

Dance lessons and piano recitals
were okay
but what I loved most was
roller skating and horses.
I was good at skating
and not so great at riding horses.

I’ve been afraid to go to sleep all my life.

When you add it all up
I was just an ordinary kid
but I was your ordinary kid,
and that’s
who you missed
knowing.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

ALONE AGAIN

In the day time
he worked at a gas station fixing cars and pumping gas
but in the evenings
he got cleaned up and left my mom
home alone
so he could go out dancing with other women.

How good he
was at hurting
both of us
by not being there.

I don’t know what the final straw was
for her, the ice cubes or the angel food cake,
(not my stories to tell)
but one day while I was still growing in her belly
she said enough
and moved out, back to the safe cocoon of her parents home
across the street from his mother’s house.

I wonder if he ever came to see his mother
and maybe glanced across the street
where his soon-to-be ex-wife lived,
with me still growing in her belly, waiting to be born
and thought about coming to see her,
trying to fix what was broken between them.

Probably not.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The first week of school
Mr. MacComber made us write our autobiography
even though most of us  hadn’t done anything more exciting
than go to the state fair over summer vacation.

We went through each year of our life
trying to remember something significant enough
to be recorded for all time.

I wrote about my father not being there
and how his not being there
left a giant hole in who I thought I was
and who I thought was supposed to be.
I wrote about how I felt like a freak,
different from everyone else,
because I was the only person I knew
who had never met their dad.
And I wrote about how sometimes
thinking about him made me want to scream
and sometimes it made me want to run away
and try to find him.

Mr. MacComber gave me an A
because I was good at writing
but then he wrote a long note
telling me I might need to go see a shrink
because it sounded like I needed some help.

But he didn’t say it like that.

He said I was mentally unbalanced
and he recommended psychiatric help.

The rest of the school year
Mr. MacComber kept watching me
like he expected me to fall apart
in front of him and the entire class.

I fell apart a little bit every day
but it was on the inside
where no one could see.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

WHAT I WANTED HIM TO SAY

I should have called
I should have written
I should have done something
to let you know I was thinking about you.

I thought about you every day
and wondered if you were happy
and tried to imagine your smile.

When I saw other little
blond-haired blue-eyed girls
my heart always caught in my throat
because they reminded me
of you.

Every day on your birthday
I paused to think of you
and hoped you would feel it.

I’m sorry I missed so much of your life,
missed getting to know you,
missed hearing you call me daddy.

Most of all, I’m sorry I hurt you
and ever made you feel that
my not being with you
meant you weren’t a good person.

That’s what I wanted him to say
and I think I could believe it,
all of it,
unless he tried to tell me
how much he loved me
because then I’d know
that everything he said before
was just a lie.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

IN MY DREAMS

Sleep rarely came easy to me
so I made up stories
about how my father traveled
the world doing important work
and how one day, soon, he would
come back to find me.
My audience of stuffed animals,
crowded around me on the bed,
listened intently and never disagreed
with my expectation of his return.

My mother came before she went to bed
and tucked me in real tight,
Snug as a bug in a rug, she said
leaving me trapped beneath the crisp, cotton sheets
unable to run from the bad dreams ahead,
the nightmare that he came back
in the middle of the night not to stay,
but to steal me away from my mother, my grandmother
the only life and family
I had ever known

I’d wake up screaming
and my mother would run to me
but I could never tell her
my dream.

I wanted him in my world.
I didn’t want to go into his.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

WONDERING

So much time wondering
about you,
who you were,
where you were,
and all that time
I was living
in the house across the street
from where you used to live
and I wonder,
did you ever
even once,
wonder about me?

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

FROM FATHER TO SON

His father, my grandfather,
was a music man
with so much talent running through his veins
he could play just about anything he wanted to play
and he sang, they said, like an Irish tenor
even though he was born, most likely,
on the Indian reservation.

Music wove in and out of his life
braided with bottles of alcohol
that brought on a giant case of mean
and chased my grandmother,
my father, and his big sister
out to the barn to hide in the hayloft
until it was safe to come out again.

Eventually Grandma ran away
taking my father, and his big sister
across the country where she could
work in the factories like Rosie the Riveter
to help the war.
But she kept making poor choices
when it came to picking men,
giving my father nothing but bad examples
of how to be a father.

If I close my eyes
and let myself imagine my father
as a little boy
hiding in a hayloft
from his angry, drunken father
who beat up his mom,
I can feel sorry for him.

But when I open my eyes
and think about what
he might have learned,
all I feel
is sad.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

It’s Poetry Friday!

The round-up of all today’s Poetry Friday posts is over at http://6traits.wordpress.com/

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

FAMILY TREE

In Mrs. Mullin’s class
we studied genetics
and how sometimes
we turn out like our parents
because of what our
cells did and didn’t do
before we were born.

We brought in pictures
and made charts about
the color of our eyes
and the color of our hair.
Kyle Williams had red
hair and his mom and his dad
and his two brothers
and his aunt Agie
all had red hair too.

For the last assignment
we made trees as tall as we were
out of brown paper bags
and taped them to the wall.

Then we cut leaves out of
green construction paper and
wrote names on every leaf
about who we were
and who are parents were
and where we came from.

Kyle had so many red-headed
relatives he needed extra leaves
for his tree.

Day after day
leaves filled the trees
telling the names of people
and where they were born
going back farther and farther
until there were so many leaves on the walls of the room
that it looked like spring had just burst out
right in the middle of our class.

My tree was lopsided.
The left side, my mom’s side,
had lots of leaves,
so many you could barely see the wall behind them.
But the right side of the tree had just two,
my father’s name,
my grandmother’s name.
No birthdays.
No birthplace.
No more branches on the family tree.

On back to school night
while the parents oohed and aahed
over the forest of families
I stood with my back against the wall
my head tucked up
under the leaf with my father’s name
and pretended
I had nothing to hide.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

There’s a picture
in my baby book
of my grandma Tina,
my father’s mom,
holding my aunt Kitty
on her lap.

I wasn’t even born yet
but still
I was jealous.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

LESSONS LEARNED

For a while, Teresa was my best friend
and we played at her house after school
because her mom didn’t have a job.

We drank grape Kool-Aid
and ate pink and white animal crackers
sitting on the teeter-totter
in her backyard.

Teresa said her dad
was the best dad because
he taught her how to whistle
with a piece of grass between her fingers,
how to ride her bike with no hands,
and how to throw a curve ball
better than Brucie Gilbert
who lived across the street.

I let her think she had the best dad
but I knew better.
My dad gave me a super power —

he taught me how to be invisible.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

I TRIED

Wishbones on Thanksgiving
my birthday cake each July
dandelions in the summer
pennies in the wishing well at the park,
and the first star, every night, before bed

Nana used to say
that wishing don’t make it so
but not wishing meant giving
up completely

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

CASE CLOSED

He forgot
how to be kind to her,
so while my mother’s belly grew round with me
she left, determined
to build a safe and loving home
for me.

Worried
he would come
take me
where she would never
find me.
she did what she thought best,
to keep me
free from harm.

One year and a day
that’s how long
she had to wait
to terminate his rights
to see me.

I never knew.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

I don’t remember the story very well,
I don’t even know if it was real,
maybe it was one of the ones I made up and told
so many times, that it became real to me.
In the story
someone came to the front door of my grandmother’s house,
asking if I was home,
asking to see me,
and my mom told my grandmother
to keep me in the kitchen
hidden from view.

That story got mixed up in my mind
with one I know was true,
the one my mother told me happened before I was born,
the one where men came to the front door of my grandmother’s house,
asking for my father
and my mother saying
he wasn’t there,
he was gone,
and she didn’t know where.

That’s what she told
those important men in suits
who needed to find my father,
needed to find him fast,
because of something he had done wrong.

All she had to give them was a list
of the people they invited to their wedding
less than a year before,
the only record she had, names and addresses of
my father’s friends, my father’s family
his mother, my grandmother
his sister, my aunt
his family, my family.

By the time I was old enough
to ask important questions
it was too late,
she couldn’t remember where anyone lived
where he might have gone
and my father,
his family
my family,
was nowhere to be found.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

SNAPSHOT

In the wedding picture they printed
in the newspaper,
now faded black and white,
my mother’s smile
is the same smile
I saw
every morning when I woke up and
every night before bed.
It was the smile that
told me she loved me
told me I was her entire world
told me everything was going to be okay.

In the wedding picture they printed
in the newspaper,
torn just a little bit between the two of them,
my father’s smile
isn’t
there

at
all.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

It’s Poetry Friday and Jules at 7 Imp has the entire round-up of today’s poetry posts.

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

CONSUMED

It was just a small fire
smoldering
on the kitchen table when
she came home from work.

It was just a small box
of photos, school friends,
kept on the closet shelf,
cherished mementos
from my mothers childhood
melting into nothingness
on the Formica table.

It was just a small spark
of jealously, uncontainable,
for him.

It was just
a
small
fire.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

THE GIFT

Seven
one dollar bills
plucked from a tired wallet,
my father’s only gift,
when forced,
in family court.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT HIM

His favorite color
What kind of music he played on the radio
The cologne he wore
His strengths and his weaknesses
What kind of car he drove
Something he was proud of
Was he a morning person or a night owl
Something that made him laugh
What did he want really want to be when he grew up

Did he ever regret not meeting me?

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved

My personal challenge for National Poetry Month is to write
a poem a day about the father I have never known.

RING RING

Sometimes the phone would ring
and I would run to answer it but by the time I got there,
the line was dead.

Pressing the receiver against my ear
I pretended it was my dad
calling to check in on me while he was gone.

Curled into a ball
on the blue and white linoleum tiles in my grandmother’s kitchen
I twisted the cord around my finger,
answering make-believe questions
while the dial tone droned in my ear like a tired bee.

My grandmother caught me once
and told me to quit playing games
that the phone was not a toy
but still, each time it rang,
I raced to be the first one
to pick it up
and say hello.

@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved