Blood is Blood, Water is Water

         My biological father was born in Utah to a Mormon family who were first generation Americans; his grandparents had emigrated from former Yugoslavia in the late 1800s. While he loved his mother, he fought hard and constantly against both his father and the Mormon religion. So terrible were his struggles and so much did he despise his life in the church that he chose to escape them by volunteering to go to Vietnam with the Army. I never heard that he regretted the choice, even upon adult reflection. He was saved from direct military combat because it was learned that he could type and thus he spent his tour of duty behind a desk with a typewriter. From what I can gather, even being a desk jockey in that war was Hell; though worse was when he finished his tour, flew back to the States and had the passenger next to him changed seats because he did not want to sit beside a baby-killer.
         After he burned his uniform, my biological father decided he would not return home. He knew people in Oregon, so that is where he settled. He enrolled in Oregon State University where he completed his bachelor’s degree, then went on to work for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife where, after several years, he met my mother, who also worked in the department. He was the aloof ex-military man who no one knew anything about; she was the upstart new girl on the team who ruffled his feathers right from the start just because she could. I’m sure it was very romantic, but something about imagining my parents being in their late twenties and flirting which gives me the jibblies. Moving on. They married and it appeared as though theirs could be a story which ended “happily ever after.” But if every life a little rain must fall and occasionally when it rains, it pours.
         A handful of years after he married my mother, my biological father began to experience unspecific but noticeable symptoms of disease, namely fatigue accompanied by occasional, random aches and pains. Eventually, he sought a physician. He received not a diagnosis, but a death sentence.
         Cancer can lay waste to even the strongest, fittest individual, yet for its raw power, it is amongst the most insidious of diseases. Your defenses fall before you are even allowed realize you are under attack. No warning. No siege. Only tragedy and death. Worse, his diagnosis coincided with a discovery that should never bring mixed emotions: my mother was pregnant.
         As the new life my mother carried grew, biological father’s life dwindled. Almost immediately, it was clear that his fight could not be won; the cancer was too aggressive and it was diagnosed too late. All he could do was hold on to his life and to his hope that he could just hold his child before he died. My mother watched as, within months, my father’s military stature dwindled to the skeletal, his tanned, outdoorsman skin paled as it was stretched tautly over his thinning frame, and his quiet, yet authoritative tones were slowly, softly strangled into airy, pained whispers. Even so, he tenaciously held onto his hope that he would be able to see his unborn son, if only for a moment. It was not meant to be. My mother scattered his ashes over his favorite river. Two months later, I was born. My name was an easy choice: Barry, after my father.
         I find the thought of asking my mother what she endured during the time which followed to not simply be distasteful, but horrific to even consider. What I do know of is that she and my biological father had taken to steps to reconnect with his family in Utah, as the simultaneous life-changing and life-ending events warranted. It helped that his father was long dead, and with him their feud. The Mormonism of his family and his own newfound Christianity created a vast gulf between the bloodline, but death and new life are the great unifying forces, and for a tumultuous year they coincided. When he died and I was born, my mother made a conscious effort to reach out to my biological relatives, despite the distance, and promised that as I grew up, I would know who they were. She kept her word.
         This is generally the part where some individuals begin to feel something akin to pity or they empathize the sorrow and loss. If they are feeling sorry for my mother’s experience and admiring her for surviving such a series of events, she deserves it. She is a remarkable and incredibly strong woman. If the same people try to feel sorry with me, I laugh at them. It is not because I am cruel or heartless, but one must understand: I was not yet born when my biological father died. I never knew him. I am merely another person who has heard this story and I admire him and I admire my mother, but she was through mourning and had moved on with her life long before I even have memories. I know who my biological father was, certainly. I’ve visited relatives in Salt Lake City, they in turn have visited my home as well, and we know we are related. But I don’t know them very well. The only ones who seemed genuinely interested in me as a person rather than the memory of my father were my grandmothers. There were divorces and remarriages involved, resulting in two grandmothers on my father’s side. How two lovely women fell for a “man” so terrible that his son chose the battlefields of Vietnam over even remaining in the same country, well… I suppose I should not judge; neither I nor my biological father would have been given the chance to walk this world if it were not for their choices.
         The point is, apart from my cousins, who knew as much about my biological father as I did, and my grandmothers, my relatives from Utah seemed to want to be around me because I reminded them of a different Barry. And I understood that. But here I am, a ten year old kid, which in turn means that the guy has been dead eleven years, and my aunt is nearly reduced to tears because “he looks so much like him.” Seriously? I’m me, not him. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell people “I don’t feel anything for the man because I never knew him.” I can know about him somewhat through his deeds, sure, and I can safely conclude that my biological father was a great man. But I never met him. He’s not my dad. Who do I call “dad?” My dad, of course.
         When I was perhaps a year old, my mother began to date a man. She had known him as an acquaintance in college but they soon found a more romantic connection. Over the course of a year they dated. Both were in their thirties at that time and both had a firm handle not only on what they were looking for in a potential partner, but also on whom they themselves were. They married on the first of May, a few days after my second birthday. I walked my mother down the aisle with balloons tied to my wrist; my grandfather was wheelchair bound at this time. It could be a trick of the mind, but I do remember sitting there in that church and watching my mom get married. What I do know for a fact is that being there, at my parents’ wedding, was not strange.
         The man who married my mother is clearly not my biological father; I knew that even then. He is a physically average Caucasian male in every way, while I am too lean, too tall, too blond, too blue-eyed, and too white. And my nose boasts its Slavic heritage proudly, much to my chagrin. He grew up in a military family, which meant that each of my dad’s siblings was born in a different state; he himself was born in Virginia, of all places.
         My dad also went to Oregon State University, as mentioned. After his graduation, he went to work for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, where he is still employed to this day. He was working in Portland when he met my mom and me. And here is where the story gets interesting. When he finally worked up the courage to ask my mom out on a date, a single woman with an infant mind you, he said something that sealed the deal for my mother and has since sent the precedent from that day forward as to his interactions not just with her, but also with me:
         “I’d like to ask the two of you out on a date.”
         I came with the deal, and he knew that from the start. He knew that if he were to get involved in my mother’s life, I would also become involved in his and he in mine. We would be a family. He would be my father. I would be his son. He never saw it any differently and once I grew up enough to understand that, neither did I. He is my dad.
         Over the course of my life thus far, I have learned a lot from my dad, and very little of it from direct instruction. I have learned to be trustworthy, dependable, and most of all responsible. I still struggle with the latter, but my father demonstrates responsibility on a daily basis so I can never forget what it looks like, even if I want to. He gets up early, mostly because once the sky is even tinged with grey it wakes him. He then progresses into a routine so precise, one could set a German train schedule by it: get the newspaper, make some breakfast (which encompassed enough for me and my sister when we were little), take the trash out if it’s a trash day. Then work. If he’s in the office, he will put in the requisite eight hours a day, five days a week. Because he’s with the Department of Agriculture, there are many days, even entire weeks at a time, where he is out in the field, in which case he leaves the house by five thirty or six in the morning, occasionally earlier, to get to some far-flung, one-horse town or just a middle of nowhere piece of land. On these days, including weekends, he is home anywhere from four in the afternoon to midnight. Sometimes, he isn’t home until the next day. If he’s been out in the field, generally my mom makes dinner, but if he is home before the dinner hour then he just might make the meal for the family anyway. And after dinner, he would help me and my sister with homework, from elementary school all the way through high school. He always had time, and always offered help.
         During sporting seasons, he was always an assistant coach, whether on my basketball team or my sister’s softball team. One year, he was my sister’s coach. And when she wanted to become a pitcher, he made sure to take her out on a daily basis to practice. Under his tutelage, my sister became the best pitcher on her softball team, the best server on her volleyball team (a real feat because she is still five foot nothing), and in school she never dipped below a 4.0 GPA, though to be fair, she is just brilliant and tenacious to begin with.
         For me, help from my dad was not direct. I did not ask, I did not indicate, I did not display much of anything, nor do I now, and so he was unable to help me in such a straightforward manner. But I watched him. I watched him get up in the morning, I heard him talk quietly with my mom, I saw him coach my sister on pitching technique using balled up socks so they wouldn’t break anything in the hallway (though she could still throw hard enough it was occasionally unavoidable). Were there times where I went to him for plain advice? Certainly. Dealing with a bully in elementary school is the first thing that pops into my mind. My dad told me to stand up to the guy verbally. I was skeptical, but I followed his advice and stared the guy down. It worked. Never saw the kid again.
         When I was in my teens, perhaps a little earlier, I came to the realization that technically, my dad was my step-father. And for that matter, my sister was my half-sister. At that young age, of course, I immediately lined up the thought of “step-father” with wicked step-mothers and tyrannical step-fathers, like in the movies or on daytime television shows where some trailer trash guy is complaining about how is step-son don’t listen. I laughed out loud to myself at this thought because not only did the stereotype not apply, but I had never considered my relationship to my father in the terms of genetic kinship. On the contrary, when I did think about genetic relationships, I think about my biological father and his side of the family. Even as a little boy, the dead guy with whom I share half my chromosomes was my “biological father.” I mean no disrespect to his memory by tacking on that descriptor, but he was never my father. It’s not that he would have been a bad father, he just never got the chance to be one and therefore he is not now, nor ever has been, considered on that level in my mind. The man is dead, and the closest I am capable of feeling toward him is that he was married to my mom for a time and he made her very happy. But as far as genetics are concerned, I’m very glad to have a metabolism that can consume vast quantities of junk food and make me no fatter, but they are genetics. They are, from my little blip of a perspective in the timeline of the universe, an inconsequential roll of the dice. I had no say in what numbers came up. My mom and dad had no control over their numbers and so had no control over mine. In other words, when people ask me if I miss my biological father or if I wish I could have met him, I say no on both counts. I cannot miss someone I never knew, and if I had known him, then he would have had the opportunity to have been my father, however briefly, and I would not be writing this.
         “Blood is thicker than water.” I hate that expression. I sincerely do. My life and my father’s love for me has proven it to be a complete and utter falsehood. As such, for this transgression against truth, it should be eliminated from the vernacular with as much rapidity as can be summoned. Granted, from a chemical standpoint, blood is thicker than water, but in regard to the spirit of the saying, give me a break. Is there some pheromone/hormone stuff that makes the feces of a baby genetically related to smell good to their parents, or makes how they throw up look cute? Yes, absolutely. But that is so you don’t strangle the little thing in its crib, because until that little critter grows up, moves away, and becomes entirely self-sustaining, it is, by definition, a parasite. It is a drain on your emotional and physical resources on every level imaginable and making the rug rat look cute is the way evolution ropes you in to actually raising the thing. Which means that the expression of blood being thicker than water can be reduced to a species-wide survival instinct to protect the pack. And because we are now sentient and therefore no longer slaves to instinct, it serves no purpose. Like the appendix.
         And so when I see my relationship with my father, I do not see the lack of physical similarity or consider the fact that our chromosomes align only enough to label us both as human. What I see is the multitude of experiences, some bad mixed in with the good, of course, and a life-long labor of love that he knew he was shouldering before he even asked my mom out on a date. He and I aren’t genetically related. By evolutionary rights, we should have been fighting and posturing for dominance since day one, which would lead me to take off like my biological father did and never come home again, ostracizing those who knew me, even my own mother. But did that happen? No. Because blood is blood and water is water and the expression comes from a time when they thought that illness was caused by small dwarf living in one’s stomach.
         In the end, my dad is who I call “dad” and the only limits on a relationship are those put there by people in it. Not outside influence, not genetic ties. He is my dad, I am his son.