by Noah (Baltimore)
My parents were allegedly a common law marriage, but the state they lived in didn’t recognize common law marriage at the time, so far as I can tell.
They were hippies, my father was a drunk and a junkie, my mother left him when I was 2 and my brother 4.
My mother followed with a string of male and female relationships, though most of my youth she was a lesbian. She remarried in our adulthood, but divorced
again after 12 years. All her siblings are divorced. My father remarried 4ish times and recently in his 60s decided he is meant to be a woman.
He also feels the need to reconnect with us but that’s all too messed up. He’s never had a role in our lives, and managed to pay child support
for one month out of our whole childhood. I have always wrestled with a lack of male figures who were sound and enviable. My brother and I both
experienced mild neglect but also physical and sexual abuse from unsafe environments.
My brother married but wrestles with his role as father. We both started dating late, totally winging it and being taken advantage of by women, along
with our own capacity for meting it out in response. I haven’t dated seriously for almost 20 years, I’m mostly desperate and sad at age 42 and
very single and ever more isolated from others, despite my recent embrace of Catholicism. I’ve always wrestled with unanswered prayer and seemingly
absent divine father. My mother actually hints at and encourages me not getting married and the pleasures of not having a committed family life
(this…she says to her own child whose life she messed with…).
I feel and think and am beginning to believe He in His Infinite wisdom is isolating me to keep me from continuing in a failed family legacy spanning
generations on both sides of abuse and neglect. I and others may think I’d be a wonderful father, but what do I know about being a son, to God
or man (especially given my F’ed upbiological father, who thinks he’s a woman…)?