by S. L. Finlay
With a lot more research, I couldn't find other children, although that didn't really mean he didn't have any. He could have had a child he didn't know about. Just as I thought that, my daughters face flashed in front of my eyes. I could see her there in mind's eye and it made me smile. He did have at least one child he didn't know about, and she was amazing.
Could he have others though?
Thinking back through his sexual history - as a marine - I could see how he could have multiple children all over the world. Pregnancy is easy done. The sad reality too is that it's harder for the women to get a safe, legal medical abortion should they choose to in much of the world.
The thought of anyone aborting my daughters half-siblings though stung, and I tried to not let it take over my thinking too much. I took a breath and released it, then got back to my research. Surely this one thought wouldn't be the only uncomfortable reality I had to face while undergoing research on my ex.
After several hours, I could put together his promotions and a time line of when they had happened. He was still living in the same home I had shared with him before we conceived our daughter, which seemed remarkable. It felt that way because most of the time those houses are given to families. But I couldn't find records of him having a family, or even a partner.
Or, I couldn't find records of him having another family at least. I knew he had this one, my daughter and I, I reminded myself. Yes, we were his family, even though I had mentally separated him from my daughter and I as 'family' a long time ago, he was still technically family.
I could find out so much about him, then I would hit brick walls. It was like there was supposed to be a family there, but there was a black hole where a family existed. It was like there was supposed to be another deployment somewhere, one where he earned his promotion, but I couldn't see one after the one he had had when we were together.
Did all of life stop when things ended between us? Was he unable to rebuild? Did he even try? I couldn't quite imagine that possibility. The possibility that he didn't just pull it together and move on after I left. Yet, I couldn't see any evidence of that on my computer screen, and that felt strange.
I cast my mind back to when we had been together, before we had conceived our child. He was happy, we were happy. This was a time I often thought about when I wore my rose-tinted lenses and recalled the past and how great it was. But then, there were other things there too, among the great parts. Daddy was often depressed. He was often so low that he had trouble getting out of bed.
When we had first met, I remember his describing his own black dog to me. No-one in his life knew how depressed he was. If anyone knew about this, we both knew the military would never have given him a gun. But he was depressed. He was prone to highs and lows, perhaps someone who had bipolar, although he never had it diagnosed for fear of being kicked out of the army.
Perhaps when I left, he had been too depressed to move on. Perhaps he had been too depressed for another deployment. Perhaps the fear that if he was given his papers again, he would come home and the world would not be right was enough to make his fragile mental health crumble. The world would be a little more wrong with each time he returned. Or at least that's what I knew he would fear, when I really sat down and thought about how he must feel. This whole time I had told myself that he would just move on as easy as that, but what if he hadn't?
But then, perhaps I was projecting things here I had to remind myself. Perhaps I was projecting mental health problems onto this situation because I wasn't ready to deal with what did actually happen when I made the decision to leave him.
Perhaps he didn't feel a thing when he came back, he merely tidied up his house, made a BLT sandwich and got on with his life. Perhaps his regimen hadn't been deployed, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. All the things I would never know, because I wasn't there. I had left.
Now was where the finding out where he was emotionally - the gray facts that existed among the concrete facts of his life - would come in if I was doing this research as a professional journalist. But how would I find out the answers to my questions as an ex girlfriend? How would I interview without him knowing it was me? How could I find out everything I wanted to know without him knowing my intentions?
Mostly, I just wanted to keep myself away from him because I feared him. I feared the control he had over me, because I loved him so much. I feared the reaction I would actually have if he opened up his arms - and his heart - to me and told me I could come back. That he would accept me and what I had done wrong and that he wanted to be part of our daughters life. Keeping myself safe emotionally was hard work. Keeping myself out of trouble too was also hard work. If he knew about our daughter, then that would be it. I would be unable to do a damn thing about anything. He would have custody visits, maybe take her on weekends. I knew when I saw him with her, I would want him. I would want us to be a family and I couldn't want that. I had to stay strong, for myself and my daughter. We both deserved better.
I agonized over my thoughts and feelings for a few days, unsure what the best approach would be to finding the answers I wanted without giving anything away myself. I thought about disguising my appearance. He had gazed upon me enough when we had been together to spot me anywhere though.
I thought about what else I could do. Perhaps a phone interview? But how to get him to trust a stranger over the phone enough to open up about such personal and invasive questions.
Thinking hard, I came to a million different ideas: getting a colleague to interview him, getting someone who was still a journalist to do the interview, rather than an editor who took the job just to hide away from their editor. I reflected on what I could say, who I could ask. What would I get them to ask for me, and how could I get them to frame the questions like some sort of common-sense military interview? Like something he wouldn't see as too foreign from his everyday life, something that wouldn't raise his heckles right away and deny me the answers I so wanted for every pressing question.
If I got too close, or someone else got too close, and asked the wrong questions, he would know where they were coming from and know not to answer. I knew I needed answers, I needed closure. But how to get that closure without giving part of myself up. I didn't feel, even after all of this time, that I could give part of myself up to this man, after what he had done to me. I ached still when I thought of it, I burned, I felt the keen sense of betrayal as if it had only happened yesterday and as if anything I did now would do nothing but make the pain that much worse.
But how was I going to find the answers I needed without giving myself up? I had explored all the options that I had, I had even asked my journalist friends - rather than the journalists who worked under me - what they had for me. Whether they would be interested in a serious bit of investigative journalism about war veterans and the families they leave back home. That was when it hit me.
Then I had a lightning bolt moment. I wouldn't need to do something underhanded to find the answers I needed, I wouldn't need to hide behind someone else, or be a puppeteer pulling a young journalists strings. I would be able to find my answers another way.
And, if it worked, if I could find my answers this way, I would know they would be true. I would need to hold back enough of myself to not give everything away, but at least this way I would know how honest he was being with each answer. I would know how honest he was being about how he felt and what had happened between us. I would know he was answering all the questions honestly and without fear of retribution, because really, what fear could he have? I was already gone. I had been gone for a long time.
The only way, I realized, for me to get the closure I needed and the answers I needed was to approach him myself. It was more important I got my answers, than it was for me to keep hiding away I reasoned in the end. He could sucker me back in, sure, but then I could stop him at the same time. I was strong.
I was going to go knock on Daddy's door and go ask Daddy for some answers. I had a lot of questions, and it fel
t like I was running out of time if I was going to do this. Not because I was actually running out of time - of that I really had plenty - but because I knew myself. I knew that I could lose my nerve at any moment, and that moment would mean the end of this. The end of me finding any answers for myself and my daughter to each burning question.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I waited out the weekend with my daughter. Even as the questions burned a hole in my chest, I knew I had to wait. I spent the weekend reflecting more on what I would ask Daddy when I saw him, and what was the best way to approach the situation. As I had more time, I thought up different elaborate scenarios in my head, each one of them a conversation with Daddy where he would tell me different things in a different order.
Sometimes when I thought of him, I would imagine he was happy, or sad, or that he missed me. Sometimes I would imagine that he would already know about our daughter, or that he wouldn't. Mostly, I just imagined how weird it would be to talk to him after all this time and what would happen if things were radically different to how I had painted them in my head: what would I think then? What would I do? What would it all mean?
Even though I was prepared to see him, I wasn't sure that it was a good idea to have him see my daughter. Not only was her leg broken right now and she wasn't in her usual good shape, which I felt sure would not be a great first meet for a father who might grow to doubt the competence of his ex to look after their child, I also wasn't sure I wanted him to be a part of her life. I had always told myself no, and I didn't want to give myself an opportunity to do a back flip on that after all this time. I wanted to go away from this still not liking him, but with answers to my questions still.
In my ideal world, things would not have gone this way at all. In my ideal world, I would have had a family differently. In my fantasies of family life when I was much younger, I would imagine how we would all live together, be married, and play happy families. I knew that happy families were really only something you saw on television, and weren't real, but I still had those fantasies from when I was a young girl and despite my current reality, I wasn't ready to let those go. I was going to punish this man for not allowing me to have the happy family I so wanted, the happy family I felt I deserved.
In my fantasies my baby-daddy and I would cook dinner together for our daughter. In those fantasies we would have picnics on the weekends or go to museums and learn new things together. We would enjoy every moment we all had together, where we would relish the time we spent together. Because your child is only this age for a very short time, then it's gone.
In my fantasies, I would get the support I needed for this growing child, I would answer her questions about her father, all the ones that hung in the air around her when she spoke about other children who got to have a father.
I wanted to give my daughter the best father I could, or none at all. I wasn't going to give her a father who I felt was mediocre, a father who had cheated on me at his first opportunity. I wanted to give her all the things all the other children had, but I didn't feel I had much more to give her. I felt just as lost in this world as she did, only, it was my job to remain strong.
When Monday came around, my daughter would be going to gymnastics. Not because she wanted to do it, but because all her friends were going and she didn't want to miss out on seeing them doing their tricks.
I understood the need to see her friends doing tricks, and smiled to myself when she told me - rather than asked me - what she would be going with her friends. "Not to flip, ma. Just to watch."
Of course I had agreed, not only because it was a good opportunity for her to see her friends and I was already paying for the gymnastics classes, but because if she was doing that, I could take off earlier from work and stop by at my old Daddy's home, and ask him the questions I had been dying to ask yet hadn't been able to until now. I could get to the bottom of things, then I could go pick up my child from her chosen sport and get back to my usual life once I had all the answers I needed.
The apprehension of approaching Daddy with my questions - with the same questions I had had for years - was huge though. I dropped my daughter off at school, and even she who was busy telling me stories about her friends in class and what whey would do today, knew something was up.
"Why are you quiet, ma?" She asked me.
I let out a breath of air I hadn't been aware I had been holding as I gripped the steering wheel tight enough to make my knuckles turn white on our Monday morning school run. I looked at her in the rear-vision mirror from the back seat where she sat.
"Nothing honey, just mommy stuff." I told her.
"What mommy stuff?" She asked me, "is it bad?"
I let out a giggle of frustration, "no, it's not bad sweetie. It's just hard."
"Why is it hard?" She asked, in that way that a child who is full of questions always asks. I just shook my head slightly and looked back at her in the rear vision mirror.
"Sometimes things are hard, this is life." I told her, in a rather macabre way that I often tried to stop myself using when I spoke to my five-year-old, but I couldn't really manage it.
My daughter shook her head at me, she didn't really understand. Then she took a punt at my pain, and trying to draw parallels with her own life, "ma, when I am trying to spell, it's hard."
"Yeah sweetie? Is it?" I asked, indulging her and trying to suppress a smile at how sweet she was being.
"Yeah!" She told me, "it's so hard! I can't spell properly, and sometimes the other kids laugh at me!" She told me, her voice sad.
"Oh no sweetie." I told her, knowing myself that her spelling was actually pretty bad. "How do you deal with that?" I asked.
Taking in a deep breath, she drew herself up a little taller in her car seat as she told me like someone who had been watching far too much television since she broke her leg, "I just get on with it. Life is too short, you know?"
I wanted to giggle at her comment, and the matter-of-factness of her response, but I held it in. My daughter was trying to be helpful, even as she didn't know what the problem at hand was, or how dire my situation felt. I couldn't deny that it was very sweet of her to look out for me like that.
Dropping her off five minutes later, she climbed out of the car at the school gate and grabbed her bag, leaning back into the car she told me, "remember mommy, you must get on with it!"
"Okay sweetheart." I told her in a way that I hoped didn't come off as too dismissive, "you just got to school and have a good day, okay?"
My daughter gave me a little nod, and with that, she was gone.
I watched her on her crutches - things she was getting better at walking with all the time, almost an expert - as she went into the school grounds through a narrow gate. She was growing up far too fast, and I would miss it if every time something went wrong, I spent my time thinking about her father and how he had done me wrong. I needed to resolve this issue, and not just for myself, but for that little lady too.
Taking a deep breath, I started the long journey to work. My personal dramas would be sandwiched by work today, and that was the struggle I would need to deal with on my own. I couldn't get out of work just because things were hard. I couldn't just up and ditch work when I was having a rough time. I had to be an adult now. I was no longer Daddy's baby girl, and that stung. Even now, even all these years later. I guessed the proximity to him - knowing that I would see him later - made old feelings stir. Something I really couldn't handle.
Even when I was his baby girl though, I still worked hard.
Only, back then, even when things were hard they were made that much easier because he was there to help spread the burden. He was there to help prop me up when I needed it, and to give me all the love I needed.
Now, I was going to spend my evening finding out exactly why that wasn't the case anymore, and how he had felt when I left, and why he had had that fling in the first place, and just how serious he was about me back then.
That's what I needed to know, among other
things. Among all the other questions I had floating around in my head, some of which I had written down, others I had not.
This conversation I was about to have was not going to be easy, it was going to be difficult and I had to be prepared for what was to come. Taking a deep breath after dropping my daughter off at school, I dove right in.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As I drove back to the home we had shared six years previously, memories of life with my Daddy started flooding back to me. With every turn, I would remember coming home: from work, from a party, from a work-related function Daddy had accompanied me to. The one where, being a young female journalist I had felt like I had to know absolutely everything about everyone. I sighed as I rounded the last corner onto the street where the base, and all the army base housing was. This felt most familiar of all. It was where I had made my home with Daddy, and where we had settled. I sighed again as I remembered all the time we had spent together here, and how this wasn't my home anymore. That part hurt the most of all.
As that last thought entered my head, I felt a sense of freedom which accompanied the sting of regret. I was free from that relationship - or at least, in some ways I was free - yet, even after all this time, I still wasn't sure I had made the right decision in leaving, and that question haunted me.
No matter what, people could make it work for the kids. 'Making it work for the kids' was so commonplace that it was almost boring. People made it work for the kids all the time. Sometimes even when people work to make it work for the kids, when their children are graduating college they look at one another lovingly and think how great it was that they decided to make it work for the kids because now it's worked for them, too. Because of their children, they had stuck together. Because of their children, their relationship had been forced to work, and because it was forced to work, it lasted long enough for them to really appreciate one another again. Their children - and their desire to both be there for their children - was what meant they could happily grow old together.
