"Unwavering Value"
I'm missing a piece of me. It's a distinct yet enigmatic void. It's strange that I can learn more about Adam and Eve, the putative first humans, than I can about myself. I've never met my father and have little hope of ever meeting him. The reason he left was because I was born without a male genital. Priority for him was keeping his personal convictions in place rather than the life he had just brought into the world. Until I reach the age of eighteen, I will only be able to think of him as a check number. Who knows what will happen after that? Mother called this long-dead man when I was eleven years old in order to collect child support. After a decade of nothing, my mother's financial woes forced her to turn to this last resort. We had a phone with a speaker and a mute button in our house from the early 1990s. In the back of my mind, there's a relic of that bygone era of technology. The speaker/mute feature was the only way I had ever been able to communicate with my father.
I was a naughty youngster, and I was aware that my mother was on the phone with my birth father that day. I was gullible. When I heard my father's voice for the first time in years, I hoped it would replace the emptiness left by his absence. I had hoped that hearing his voice would allow me to position my father on the same level as other fathers who had always been present for their children and had a deep and abiding love for their kids. Using the technological phone, I infiltrated the room and eavesdropped on the talk. I felt devious and clever as I hit the speakerphone button and heard the stranger's voice. Hah, I mused. He can't hear me but I hear him. Just knowing his daughter was listening might have given him the opportunity to show some semblance of humanity.
I was able to glimpse a sliver of the man who makes up half of my DNA in those brief minutes. Unfortunately, the stranger didn't know that I was paying attention to what he was saying. He had no idea I was there, just like in my previous existence. I could hear the terror in my mother's voice as he screamed at her, and I knew he was responding to her cries with such hatred. It was my mother's goal to express to my father that I was more than just his incarnation to care for. During the talk, my mother's remarks affirmed me as a daughter, but my "father's" insolence broke my heart as a human being.
That tiny girl, who had been so ecstatic at the idea of being able to hear her creator for the first time, was devastated in the moments that followed. There is no obligation to love or know her simply because she exists." There is no way I could ever love her. Crash. What if your body's strongest muscle just snapped in half? It had come to my attention that one of my chromosomal half despised my own existence. My heart was shattered into a million pieces by those words. I didn't know what to do in the face of this news. Sliding back into my room, I unplugged my phone and shut it off. I don't see how someone could be that callous. Who could possibly be a part of me if they were so callous? There are no words for this.
A psychiatric research could never have done what pain has done for me. Because of his decision, I may never meet my father, and he may never meet me either. In the end, he will suffer a larger loss than anyone else. It is odd that I am guided by my "father's" bright example of dishonesty. Rather than focusing on my own shortcomings, I exploit my father's. I approach life with a sincere and open-minded attitude. I am fully aware of how highly I am valued. Everyone, including myself, can rest easy knowing that I have nothing to prove.
