FCYU-Feature Story

Denied a Dad
I deserve to know my father

By James Bodrick

When I was a child, I didn’t know my father and never gave a thought to what a father was supposed to be. The only parent I’d ever known was my mom. At school, the other kids were usually with their moms, so I honestly hadn’t even thought about the fact that everyone had a father, even me.

But when I was 9, I started seeing my older brother with his father and it made me jealous. I began to wonder, “Do I have one?”

Not long after that, I found out from my mother that I did have a father. This was shocking news to me, but I was happy and also curious to meet him. I wondered where he’d been for the first nine years of my life.

I was living with my older cousin and her family in Brooklyn at the time. One sunny summer day, my mother came from South Carolina with my little sister to visit. I remember that I was playing outside with my kid cousins in front of the house when my mother approached me and said, “Come with me, I want you to meet someone.”

She walked me over to the sidewalk where a man was standing and introduced him as Tony. Then she told me that Tony was my father. The man was very tall, dark, and skinny. He took a look at me and smiled, but not a word came from his mouth.

My mother stood there and smiled at the both of us like she was waiting for a big dramatic breakthrough of joy, love, compassion, and tears. But that sure enough wasn’t going to happen to me. I didn’t even know this man. So I just smiled back and slowly walked away to my cousins.

No Longer Alone

But for the next couple of weeks, I thought about Tony and it started to sink in that he really was my father. I started thinking that to have that other half of me so close by was really something, especially since my mother was hardly ever around. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted him in my life.

One day I was walking to the train station and I bumped into my father in front of an apartment building. He recognized me right away.

“Hey, Jamell,” he said in a friendly way (everybody calls me Jamell). I asked him if he lived there, and he said yes. After that day, I would walk down the block all the time just to see him.

Every time I saw my father on the block he gave me a dollar and told me that if anyone bothered me, I could let him know. He also told me that he loved me.

It made me so happy to hear that word coming from my dad. It wasn’t something I heard much from my mom or anybody else. If he was with a group of friends he would tell them, “That’s my son. Doesn’t he look like me?” It made me feel like we had something special.

Now I could say “I HAVE A FATHER,” and I felt loved. Finally I was not left alone in the world.

But when the cousin I lived with found out I was visiting my father, she told me to stay away from that man. She said that Tony was not my father and that my mother didn’t know what she was talking about.

Don’t Take Away My Dad

I didn’t know what to say to her, so I didn’t say anything. But inside I was screaming, “No, no, no! I finally meet my father and you want to take him away from me? I don’t think so!”

I felt like no one wanted me to be happy, and that made me very angry. It also made me want to go see my dad more.

I kept meeting with him for a few months until the day I moved to my new foster home with a kind woman named Ms. Barnes. She lived far away from where my father lived, which made me sad because I wouldn’t be able to see him anymore.

Sometimes I was angry at myself for choosing to move, and I was also angry at him for not trying to stay in touch with me. But I still thought about him here and there, mostly when I saw someone else with their father.

Abandoned All Over Again

It was five years before I saw my father again. When I was 13, I went to go visit my uncle Gregg back in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It happened to be a block party, and I bumped into my other uncle, Bernard.

Bernard said, “I just saw your father! Do you want to go see him?” I said, “Sure.”

As we walked, I was nervous and even a little scared. I didn’t know how he might look, or how he would react to seeing me. Would it be like the very first time, when we had nothing to say to each other? Or would it be like the times we met on the block? Would he hug me and say, “Let’s take a walk” to find out what I was feeling and get to know me again? I was hoping for that.

We got closer and closer to the party. There were a lot of people. All of a sudden my uncle stopped in front of an old man. I realized it was Tony, but he looked way different from the last time I’d seen him. He seemed to be in his 50s, with gray hair, and now I was taller than him.

My uncle Bernard told me, “Look at your father.” And when I did, I was happy, angry, and unforgiving all over again, just like when I’d visited with my mom. For the past 11 years, I’d felt like my mother was never there for me when she could have been. And here now was another parent who had abandoned me.

No Words for Each Other

Unlike when I was younger, I knew now what the definition of a father was: A father was another parent who should take care of you. But that wasn’t how things were in my case. Tony hadn’t even thought of contacting me. I had so much to ask him.

But the words wouldn’t come out. I had too much anger in my heart. I wanted to choke him, but all I could do was smile, smile, and smile, and he smiled back at me.

After about 15 seconds, my uncle said to me, “Well, are you just going to stand there or give him a hug?”

Deep down inside I didn’t want to hug him or even look at him. I was just too hurt. Just to break the tension, though, I hugged him and then went back to smiling at him. We had no words for each other. Only smiles.

Then Tony turned to my uncle and whispered in his ear, “What’s wrong with that kid—he smiles too much.”

That made me even angrier. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to say, “I’m your son and all you have to say is why am I smiling? You lucky I’m not f-cking you up! I’m your own blood, and you’re not reaching out to me. Where’s the love? Get real!”

But instead I told myself that I was the bigger man, something my father couldn’t be. I walked away furiously.

What Am I Here For?

While I was walking, all I kept thinking was how I was going to be a much better parent when I had my own kids. I was going to be the mother and father that my parents weren’t.

All that night I couldn’t get my father and what he’d done off my mind. My father was a dummy for letting something like me go.

But I was so depressed. I was thinking things like, “No one loves you, no one cares. Your own parents didn’t even love you.” I got mad, and then I got a knife and thought, “If no one loves me, then why should I love myself? What am I here for?” I took the knife and cut my arm deeply. It was the first time I’d ever cut myself.

The blood started rushing down my arm. With every drop of blood that fell to the ground, I started feeling better. After that day I tried not to think about my father at all.

My Real Dad?

Last summer, I got the bad news that my grandmother (my mom’s mother) had passed away back in South Carolina, where my family is from. I had lived with my grandmother when I was little until she got too sick to take care of me, so I was devastated.

Her funeral was going to be held down south in three days. My uncle Ezekiel and two of my cousins and I went down together.

I hadn’t seen my mother’s family since I was small. When I got down there, I was expecting so much praise. I thought they might say things like, “Oh, you’re doing so good in school!” or “You got so big!” I thought they’d hug me, but I didn’t get any of that. I got nothing but “Hi, Jamell.”

Two days after the funeral, my older brother came out of nowhere talking about my father. “Your father was a killer,” he told me. “Your father was the man. He always had money. That’s where you got the nickname Jamell from. But he’s dead now.”

I was thinking in my mind, “Jamell? I thought my father’s name was Tony.” I didn’t say anything, though. I decided to wait and get the truth from my mother, not my brother.

Who Should I Believe?

But my brother must have seen the shocked expression on my face, because later that night as we were walking into the house, he blurted out to my mother, “Why’d you say Jamell’s father is Tony?”

She just said, “Your father isn’t Tony” in a matter-of-fact voice, as though everybody knew that. And that was all she said regarding my father. She never told me who my real father was. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say any more.

At least I knew that man Tony was not my father, and that made me feel like a jackass for believing that he was. Now I was left with a giant question about who my father really was, and whether he was even alive. If he was alive, where was he–Africa? China? France? Who was he and what did he look like?

If Things Had Been Different

Just the other day my foster brother got to meet his father for the first time in his 17 years. His father had managed to get in touch with him after all that time.

He was angry and sad and confused at first, but mostly he seems happy that his father is here now. And even though I was happy for him, I felt jealous once again.

If my father and mother were here and we were all living together, I think my life would have been happier, or at least easier and less stressful. But that’s all a dream now, and that makes me feel like a real failure.

I think if my father and mother were in my life I wouldn’t be who I am today, which is a boy who’s lost, who can’t even read or write properly, who’s in special education and who feels like he will never fulfill his dreams. When I see two parents in a household, the child seems to have education naturally. It like it’s born with the child.

What They Couldn’t Give

My old foster mother, Ms. Barnes, was really the only one in my life who encouraged me, who told me to go out there and accomplish things. Sometimes I ask myself, “What would Ms. Barnes say?”

But since she’s not around anymore, I have to rely on the voice inside of myself that tells me right from wrong. Sometimes the voice is like the voice of a parent that I don’t really have. This voice tells me to stay in school when I feel like dropping out and keeps me away from bad things so I don’t end up in jail. But it’s hard to achieve all that alone.

In the future, I don’t know who that voice will be. Maybe it will be my child. But that means as a parent I have to find the voice that my mother and father couldn’t give me.

When I have kids of my own, I’ll show them love, take care of them, and stay by their side. I might over-spoil them because I know how it feels not to have somebody there for you. As a father, I would never want my kids to feel alone like I did.

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