Sad Mom Issues

I knew things were different in my house because I didn’t have a dad and my mom was, well … sad all the time. I don’t remember when I realized other kids had dads and I didn’t. And I definitely don’t remember anyone sitting me down and telling me mine was dead. But I do remember the story. Or at least the version of it that’s been implanted in my head by my mom.

Your dad and Nate Ramsey didn’t like each other. They told each other, “If I ever see you again, I’m going to kill you.” So your dad went out one night, without his gun, ran into Nate and … that was that.

People like to talk about what happens to girls who grow up without fathers. Daddy issues, they call it. Funny enough, my dad was never really the problem. The version of my dad that lived in my head was a very intelligent man who kept to himself, loved to dance, played chess and treated my mom like a queen.

Loretta Payne and John Nelson met at West Philly High School. My mom had a crush on my dad but never made it known. After graduation, according to her, he just disappeared. She always wondered what happened to John Nelson. Well, what had happened was John was in jail. For ten years. Involuntary manslaughter. That’s about as much as I know about that story, but I do remember when my mom told me. My first thought was, So you married a murderer?

She did. After my dad got out of prison, he and my mom reconnected and eventually got married. They wanted a child and tried for four years with no luck. In the fifth year, my mom finally got pregnant. Three months later, my dad was murdered.

I’ve been told my mother was a completely different person before my dad died. And the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that she was already carrying a lot before she lost him. My mom came from a pretty abusive childhood. Not at the hands of my grandparents, but my Uncle Leroy’s friend, Paul Fipps. He was the “family friend” who molested my mother from the time she was 10 until she was 17.

There is one conversation between my mother and grandmother that I still remember. My mother said, “He shoved Coca-Cola bottles up me and you did nothing about it!” My grandmother responded, “Oh Loretta … Paul never did anything to you.”

I remember being there for that conversation. I don’t remember anyone saying anything after that.

So by the time my father was murdered, my mother was already carrying things I wouldn’t begin to understand until I was much older. What happened to her as a child. What her own mother refused to believe. And then, while she was pregnant with the child she had waited years to have, her husband left the house one night and never came home. I don’t know which thing broke what. Maybe that’s not even how it works. I just know there was already a lot there to break.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also been able to piece together more of who my father actually was. He was a good man who also got caught up in gang life. I don’t know what the gang was called, but apparently he “ran numbers” … whatever that means. He was tall, dark and handsome, and ALL the ladies loved him. Especially because he could dance.

He was also quiet, and he played chess. My mom told me he would come home from work, make a move or two on the chessboard and then leave the game sitting there until the next day. Then he’d come home and make another move. I’ve always loved that story about him. Maybe because when someone dies before you ever get the chance to know them, you build a person out of little things. A story about a chessboard. The way someone says he could dance. The fact that women thought he was handsome. The way your mother’s face changed when she talked about him.

Then, about three years ago, I found out my dad had another daughter before me. My sister. My mom never told me. Those DNA tests are something, aren’t they?

My half-sister and I met for lunch, and for the first time in my life I was sitting across from someone other than my mother who actually knew my father. She told me that when my parents were newlyweds, my dad would pick her up on the weekends and take her out. He stayed in her life. He spent time with her. He made sure she knew him.

My mother had already been dead for about four years by then. She died leaving me believing I was an only child. So there I was, decades after my father died, sitting across from his other daughter and hearing about the man I never got to meet. And she told me he showed up.

I think that mattered to me more than I realized at the time. For my entire life, I had created this version of my father from other people’s memories, mostly my mother’s. Now here was someone who had actually gotten to have him as a dad. And the father she remembered was the father I had always imagined: a really good dad.

People always assume a girl who grows up without a father will have daddy issues. I never did. My father was dead, but somehow I grew up believing he loved me.

My mother was right there.

I had sad mom issues.