Searching for My Father

Chapter 1 Me

The therapist I’ve been working with suggested that if I’d write this down it would help me sort out who I am, why I am that person and establish a foundation for who I want to be.  She said while there are like 7 billion people in the world, each and every one is an individual so this didn’t need to be anybody’s story but mine.  I was told not to try to make it a polished document but just write my thoughts down as they occurred to me, so it will ramble a bit.  Here goes.

You can stare into the mirror a thousand times and tell your reflection that it wasn’t your fault your parents divorced and still not incorporate that into the way you interact with the world.  Trust me on that one.   Anyway, despite being raised, loved and fussed over by my mom, my life has been dominated by my absent father.

So, yeah, the 'rents married the June after high school graduation and were off to college to ‘make it work’.  Over the course of the next few years dad found a wife and baby incongruous with the life of a college football hero and I can hardly remember the time they were still together.  Five years of college for him was followed by two years of arena football, three years of assistant coaching at a small university and seven years as head coach, culminating in a division three national championship.  He was hired onto the coaching staff of a professional team, worked his way up and by the time I was in high school, he was an NFL offensive coordinator.  Nobody else’s dad was remotely as cool as mine.  Oh, and on the subject of remote, after my parents left college he never lived within a thousand miles of us.

He loved the concept of me and my theoretical existence; he just never had enough time to spend with me to know who I was.  I was supposed to be with him a month every summer, but summer is as busy as fall for an ambitious football coach.  On paper I spent spring breaks and every other Christmas with him, but in reality I didn’t back when I was a little kid.  He got remarried when I was eight, and his new wife was really nice to me, but she competed for the busy, driven man’s attention and free time, too. 

The Christmas when I was fourteen, his NFL team was headed for the playoffs and the longest period I saw him was sitting in the house of some strangers (who were additionally my step-family) and watching his game on TV.  In his mid-30s, fit, focused and in command, he looked like a Nordic god.  I fixated every time some unknown cameraman gifted a shot of him, bareheaded with the snowflakes swirling around him, our society’s ultimate alpha male.  At half-time he got a quick locker room tunnel interview, and I fantasized that it was me, there…next to him, close, holding the microphone, looking adorable and smiling up at him through my eyelashes, hanging on every word he uttered.

Damn, I was desperate with desire for a little piece of him.  Right after the little interview Megan, dad’s wife (coincidentally my stepmother), walked in and found me crying.  Despite being my principle competition, I gotta’ give the woman snaps for being cool.  She understood, and she sat down next to me and put her arm around me.  I jumped up, sending her bowl of popcorn flying, and turned on her, shouting, “I don’t want you!  I want my father!”  She looked hurt and scurried out of the room.  I ran after her, sobbing that I was sorry, and caught up to her in the kitchen. 

Did I say she was cool?  She was.  She didn’t say anything, she just opened her arms and held me and let the tears run down my face, understanding but knowing she couldn’t fix it.  By this time, they had a little boy of their own, Willie (of course he got a masculine name) and he followed the sound of the commotion and found us.  “Why is Perry crying?” he asked his mom.  Then he added, “Daddy said boys don’t cry.”

Oh, by the way, my birth certificate name is ‘Peregrine’.  Peregrine LeTourneau.  Yeah.  Shrug.  My then nineteen year-old parents thought it was cool.  Oh, but then my still very young single mom signed me up for pre-K as “Perí”, which she pronounced like the French pronunciation of ‘Paris’ but blessedly almost everyone else pronounces ‘Perry’.  In a tribute to my mom’s infinite love, I was almost ten before I realized other boys thought my name was goofy.

Anyway, my step-mom and I sort of had a start on a meaningful relationship after that and began emailing each other, and it was kind of nice to be a part of my dad’s life in that not-really-what-I-wanted way.  But you know, my relationships with females were never a problem.  My mom and I were fierce tight, the way single moms and their only offspring sons often are.  I may have lost the genetic lottery for build, stature and muscle, but thanks to mom I scored on looks.  Given that and being funny, polite and, I dunno, I guess looking at my grades I’d say I was reasonably smart, I was popular with girls at school.  I can’t complain that the girls only looked at me as friend material; I was the one that looked at them as only friends.  The love relationship I was missing, and so therefore the one I exclusively desired, was with that amazing, all powerful, all knowing man that is every young boy’s father.

I was fast and coordinated and excelled at sports until the other boys started to get a lot bigger.  They started packing on muscle, too, in a way that I didn’t seem to be able to.  I was an all-area running back in junior high.  My sophomore year in high school I was carried off the football field three times in three games:  the first game of the season with ‘my bell rung’, the second game with a concussion, and the seventh game with a broken humerus and clavicle.  While I was lying in the emergency room bed I was told I would never be allowed onto a football field again.  This wasn’t my mom’s decision; the coach came after the game and said he knew how important it was to me because of who my dad was, but that he had already violated his personal standards by letting me play after the concussion.  Then he told me some really wonderful, uplifting stuff about how everybody had unique talents and abilities and we should dream our own dreams and seek our own path and that if we lived our lives with integrity and always did our best then our parents and families and communities would always love us and admire us.  I smiled through the pain and nodded and thought it was all ********.