Meeting My Biological Father
By Mark Yakich
I’m not sure there’s a right way for an adult adoptee to meet a biological father, what in adoption circles they call birthfather or biodad—but never baby daddy. None of these terms adequately describes the situation, much less prepares one for first contact.
My adoption itself is another story—involving a nun (dead), a priest (not him) and a 39-year search. Part of that search led me to meeting my biological father.
I’d written him an old-fashioned letter saying that I believed he was my birthfather and that I wanted to meet him. I specifically mentioned that I had no desire to disrupt his life. (I’d already discovered he was married and had four adult children.)
I remember having a hard time figuring out how to sign-off. “Best wishes,” perhaps? Sincerely yours?” I settled on “Kindly,” and mailed the letter marked “personal” to the hospital where he worked.
A week passed, and another. Then, an email reply: “I apologize for the delay...June is a busy month in the medical operating room business in addition to my running a golf tournament for my med school reunion…. I definitely want to meet you….”
Golf? I suppose doctors are expected to do it, but somehow the image didn’t sit well with me.
Later that day he phoned, saying he was going out of town with his daughter and her children for a few days. “I’ll be out of town, too,” I lied. We arranged to have lunch in a week. He took a note—I could hear it being scratched down on a pad, like a prescription.
“I’ll wear a red shirt,” he said, “so that you can find me.”
Before I could think of what I might wear, he hung up.
As I pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, I spied a man who looked like the fellow I’d Google-imaged, but who appeared older than the 71 years I’d calculated. He ambled toward the entrance.
I parked the car and took a moment, writing down my initial thoughts on the back of my hand: If I could do it all over, I’d have married your mother.
That’s what I wanted him to say when we met just inside the entrance. But instead he said: “I can see a resemblance.”
He was bald; I was insulted. I didn’t want to go bald. But he was right, we did look somewhat alike. The Lebanese was obvious: dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes.
The waiter led us to a booth, and we ordered iced tea. He immediately excused himself to the men’s room. I had to go as well, but I wasn’t going to move. I was going to sit there and watch his iced tea, contemplating whether I should poison it before he poisoned mine.
He returned. “I am a first-generation American.”
“I know,” I said.
He delivered a brief monologue about a village in the hills of Lebanon under Ottoman rule where his father’s and mother’s parents and their brothers all starved to death at the hands of the Turks, then a long trip to the States, a last name change, Ellis Island, etc.
An hour before, my wife and I had let’s-get-it-on-before-the-baby-wakes-up sex. It wouldn’t have been important if I’d not gotten a pubic hair stuck in the back of my throat. It was exceedingly difficult to concentrate on what he was saying and what I thought I should be saying. I concealed my discomfort as much as possible, and considered faking as though I was choking on a fried oyster. No matter he was an anesthesiologist, I figured he’d still recall the Heimlich. Maybe it’d bring us closer.
“I wanted to burst forth: Look how well I turned out! A professor, a husband, a father—and you had nothing to do with it.”
More about his family—his daughter and sons, all but one born before I was. “If you ever need a spinal surgeon,” he said, “Rabih is one of the best in the country.”
I was about to mention my scoliosis when I saw he was looking at the writing on the back of my hand. He raised his eyes and said, “And I have thirteen grandchildren.”
“Fifteen,” I said, and regretted it despite the apparent glow on his face. He didn’t ask for my kids’ names, or to see photos.
I attempted to steer the conversation to my birthmother. But he was now recounting his resume. How he’d made his name as a surgeon by performing an innovative operation on the carotid artery; how the intensive care unit at the hospital where he’d met my birthmother grew out of his work in anesthesiology; how he’d worked under terrible conditions and with little pay at Charity Hospital and the VA; how as a professor at the medical schools he’d taught almost all the doctors in New Orleans.
I wanted to burst forth: Look how well I turned out! A professor, a husband, a father—and you had nothing to do with it.
I said nothing. He was still moving his mouth, and he’d not grown any hair yet on top of his head. Had he been bald when they got together? I wondered if they did it in his office or in a linen closet of the hospital. If he’d intended from the beginning to make love to a nun, ruining the rest of her life.
Suddenly I heard his voice: “How’d you find me?”
I couldn’t tell him the truth—that a woman at Catholic Charities in Boston practically told me his name over the phone—but I was too slow to make up a story.
“I was surprised,” he said. “Because we weren’t that sexually active. Our relationship was based on common interests. I was a young chief surgeon, she was head nurse. We bonded over medicine.”
I wondered how long he’d been rehearsing those lines.
“I couldn’t really do anything,” he said. “I had a wife and family.”
He paused. I nodded.
“I don’t think I could have done differently…you know…you do what you do.”
I was on the verge of breaking down in front of a stranger. I grabbed hold of myself, literally pinching my thigh under the table.
“It was a meaningful relationship,” he said. It was the concluding sentence to one of my students’ theme essays. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that.”
I gave him a B- for effort. I moved my tongue around in my mouth, searching for the pubic hair.
“While she was in medical school, she did a clinical with me,” he said. “ I didn’t see her again until it was too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“She had the most aggressive breast cancer I’ve ever seen. The Jewish surgeon who removed her tumor is a friend of mine. He still remembers her case 15 years later. When I found out—she called me—it was already very advanced. She’d gotten a mammogram and they’d seen a small mass, but didn’t feel the need to biopsy it. When she went in for a check-up a few months later, the cancer was everywhere. I still can’t understand why she waited. She was a doctor for god’s sake.”
The virulence of her breast cancer was news to me. Her best friend and her family, who I’d been growing close to for months, had been protecting me.
I interjected: “I talked with her oncologist, who told me the cancer she had isn’t genetic.”
“Men can get breast cancer, too. If I had the gene, I’d get both pectorals cut out just in case. My older brother died of a rare lymphoma.” He paused and his eyes began to water, as they hadn’t when he talked about her.
“He was my favorite brother,” he said, “WWII flying ace, his plane was shot down over France, shattering his arm. He was into real estate. He loved magic tricks, and was like a father to my kids, especially as I’ve worked long hours my entire life.”
“While time has allowed me to let go of my initial anger, it hasn’t changed my mind about who my dad really was. It wasn’t him. And yet, without him, I’d not be me.”
The pubic hair had worked its way out and I quietly spit it into my napkin. I couldn’t help picturing him going down on her, as she clutched her rosary, but I realized he wasn’t going to give me any details from the moment of my conception—no one shares those kinds of details with their children, illegitimate or not.
I told him that I thought she gave me up for adoption because she grew up without a father, and he said he knew about her parents’ divorce.
I finally excused myself to the bathroom. When I came back, he was sitting with folded hands. His plate was clean and pushed to the side. My sandwich was hardly touched.
Since that meeting 10 years ago, we’ve continued the semi-secretive lunches—one about every six months. At the end of each, he shakes my hand and says, “All right, my boy, let’s not make it too long. And if you need a good doctor….”
I never quite know how to reply. I don’t feel like his boy, and the only reason I agree to the meetings is to see if he’ll share a crucial detail or story about my birthmother that nobody else has.
While time has allowed me to let go of my initial anger, it hasn’t changed my mind about who my dad really was. It wasn’t him. And yet, without him, I’d not be me.
Do you discover who you are or do you invent who you are? Sometimes transformation means embracing the ambiguity and its lingering presence. I never met my birthmother. My mom and dad are now dead. My birthfather remains. Am I still a son? It’s complicated, or maybe it’s simple: the question itself just another ambiguity to carry.
Mark Yakich is the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. His most recent books are Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide and Spiritual Exercises.