I was behind this SUV just a few minutes ago. It had one of those horribly annoying 'Family Members'-type adhesive thingies on the back window (you know the ones.....Dad, Mom, all 10 kids, dog, cat, etc., in some sort of cartoon form).
As I got closer to the car, I could see there had been a family member 'erased', so to speak, from the line-up. I'm sure you can guess which one it was. The scratchings from the razor that must've been used to remove him were still pretty evident; it was sloppily...hastily done.......probably extremely recently.
I instantly felt bad for the remaining 'cartoon kids' on the window......wondering how that made them feel, having their father 'snuffed out' like that. I empathize with them, you see. My own mother did very much the same thing with my real father.
Big differences, however. They were never married. In fact, she was still married to my siblings' father. My grandparents frowned on the whole thing, naturally.....being 'good Catholics' (talk about a fucking oxymoron), shaming my mother into removing my father from the picture all together. She even gave me the last name of her then-husband....which he absolutely hated her for, and rightly so.
I never did get to meet my dad....nor were there ever any pictures of him, nor a name to find him by. It was a clean break, all right. According to my mother's accounting of the situation, the last time my father saw me, I was not quite 2 years old. I wouldn't go to him, she says. I can imagine that must've killed the poor man.
Why did he come to see me? Why did she allow THAT one occasion and no future ones? Did he just give up after that? Or, probably closer to the truth is that he made a gesture which turned out horribly and was subsequently relieved that he wasn't being asked to support me.
Either way, something was cut from my life. Just like on the window of that SUV, the marks will never go away.
