all the best cowboys have daddy issues

by David P. Staggs

My hand grips the steering wheel as I turn left onto Smith Valley Road. My car’s built-in Bluetooth connection rings and my media screen lights up with a cartoon version of my mother. I hit the little green button to connect the call.

“Dave, I’m sorry,” my mother begins, and I tell her she has nothing to be sorry for, but she’s insistent she does. Insistent that it is her responsibility to apologize. It is one of the traits that the program gave her. She’s a stairmaster, and she works that ninth step religiously.

“I was so scared,” She tells me, “that they were going to take him, too. I didn’t want to lose him.”

My mother’s voice cracks, and I know she’s crying and trying not to let it show. For Christmas, my wife and I got my older brother one of those ancestry DNA kit gimmicks. He didn’t know his father well and my wife and I had both done them, as well, recently and thought he might find it interesting to learn more about his familial background. See, technically, my siblings and I are all half, but none of us have ever thought that. We’ve always just been family. Anyway, my brother took the DNA test and sent it away and a few weeks later he got his results back. After forty-two years, my brother found out that the person he thought was his father was not his father. It was someone else.

“I know it was selfish of me,” my mother says, and I tell her that it was okay, that it was an okay, selfish decision to make, and I mean it. My brother had suspected for at least two decades that the man on his birth certificate wasn’t actually his father. He bears some resemblance to the man who is his actual father. Mom even told him that there was a possibility. My brother never expressed any anger over this.

“I just didn’t want to lose another one,” my mother repeats, and I swallow. I don’t like this part of the story. When my mother was a freshman in college, she got pregnant. My grandparents were appalled. They told her—in no uncertain terms—that she could not keep the baby. She couldn’t do that to them. What would people say if their still-teenaged daughter had a baby out of wedlock? What a scandal that would be in Sunday Mass. They told her she could either give the baby up for adoption or never be welcome back in their home. My mother, scared and heartbroken, agreed to a closed adoption, and they sent her to a home for unwed mothers until the pregnancy, birth, and adoption were complete. They hid her away so their neighbors wouldn’t see, so their social circle wouldn’t talk.

“I was so afraid, Dave.” My mother tells me, and I tell her again that I understand, but I don’t. I mean, I understand the logic of her decision. My brain can connect those dots. It tracks, but I don’t understand what she was going through. I don’t understand how that ate at her. The damage it did to her when she was still forming who she was as a person. What it must have felt like to have the people who were supposed to love you, unconditionally, and protect and support you tell you that if you keep your baby you’re no longer their daughter.

So, my mother told a lie the size of creation. She married a man she didn’t really like but thought she could fix and told him he was my brother’s father, and he signed the birth certificate. For forty years, my brother was cursed with him. He was not a good father. He was an unabashed drunk. One time, when my brother was a little kid, he left him sitting on the front porch of his house for six hours because he was out drinking and forgot it was supposed to be his time with his son. It was Christmas. I can’t imagine the scars my brother carries. The weight of it. How do you learn to love yourself when your father doesn’t? Or doesn’t more than he loves drinking, and he was, at least, an honest alcoholic.

My brother and I don’t talk about his trauma. We don’t really talk about my trauma. Sometimes we talk about our shared trauma.

“He could have had a real father,” my mother says, and she cannot hide that she is crying. I know there’s nothing I can say to take this pain away from her, so I just listen. I listen to her tears and her grief and the four decades of pain she’s tried to medicate with booze and weed and cocaine and crack and heroin and sex and food and self-flagellation.

***

I sit behind the wheel of my car again, and I can’t stop crying. This is a new phenomenon in my life. This inability to stop crying. This weight on my chest keeps pushing down, and I feel like I can’t breathe no matter how much I try. It feels like drowning above water. I call my mother as I drive towards the barn I work at a few times a week to get my horse fix. She answers, and we exchange pleasantries. I love my mother. I call her a few times a week to check in on her. She lives a thousand miles away, and I worry about her down there by herself. I’m sure she felt the same way when I lived in California and she didn’t. I’m sure she still worries about me.

“Can I ask you something?” I ask her, and I know she’ll say yes, and she does.

“How are you not angry with grandpa?” I ask her, needing to know. For my entire life, my grandfather has been the epitome of what I want to be. I have tried to comport myself in a way that he would be proud of. I’ve tried to be the kind of man I thought he was. Honest. Hard working. Charitable. He was a man who won the Monsignor Busald Award and the St. John Bosco Medal from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. He was a founding member of the church my grandmother still attends – and he wasn’t baptized as a Catholic until shortly before he died. He was a man who had hundreds of people show up to his wake to pay their respects because he had touched some part of their lives. He was a man that would take me, my siblings, and my cousins out driving on Christmas Eve to see if we could find Santa, while everyone else set presents up at the house. He taught me how to tie a tie. He showed me what a man loving his spouse looked like. He took me to Golden Gloves fights on school nights and made me feel special. He listened to me and made me feel seen. The version of my grandfather that I have idolized my entire life couldn’t be capable of the vitriol he showed my mother. It couldn’t be the same man. How could the man who took me to the fair and held my hand be the same man who told his daughter she wasn’t welcome in his home? How could the man who blew me kisses when he dropped me off for preschool be the same one who told his daughter that she wouldn’t be his daughter anymore.

“I was,” she tells me, “For years I was. Part of me still is. But it was killing me,” and maybe for the first time in my life I understand my mother’s addiction. I mean really understand. I know that addiction is a disease. That it happens to anyone, and that it isn’t about strength or weakness and that most addicts are running from something or chasing something. I had never understood what my mother was running from or chasing.

I ask my mother if after she gave birth to the sister I’ve never known if that’s when her substance abuse really started to get out of hand. She’s silent for a long time.

“Yes,” she tells me.

And I understand. I can see my mother then. A girl not yet really a woman. The emptiness of being forced to give up something she wanted mixing with knowing that she was unwanted, that she wasn’t good enough as she is and I can see how anything that altered her state of mind would be appealing. I can see the broken person trying to find anything to heal and (short of that) to medicate the pain and looking for anyone who would love her or love on her regardless of the quality of human being they were.

“What kind of man would have wanted me?” she says to me, and she doesn’t have to say the rest. What kind of man would want used goods? What kind of man would love someone who’s own parents didn’t love her enough to support her?”

“Did they ever apologize?” I ask her.

“No,” She snorts, “We never talked about it. We still never talk about it.”

I ask my mother if she wants to talk about it more. She doesn’t really. She just wants to feel seen. She wants to know that she matters.

“I love you,” I tell her.

***

“If you had been honest… Maybe the rest of us wouldn’t be here,” I tell my mom, meaning my younger sister and me.

“Yeah,” She says, “And I wouldn’t trade you for the world.”

***

I sit in my car, and I sob uncontrollably, and I hate myself. Not for crying, necessarily, though I do hate that I am crying. I hate why I’m crying. I hate what that says about me.

My mother asks me what’s wrong.

I tell her I hate how selfish I’m being. That I’m not being fair.

She asks how I am being selfish.

I’m jealous, I tell her. Jealous that my brother gets a second chance at having a father and that this second chance wants to be involved. He calls my brother, and they talk. He comes up over five hundred miles to visit with him. They go get dinner. He is interested in my brother.

I’m happy for my brother. He deserves this chance. My brother is a good man. He has struggled with bipolar disorder. He’s struggled with depression and ADHD, and I’ve seen that struggle. I’ve seen my brother not leave his room for a week and have to be forced out. I’ve seen him go to the hospital. I’ve seen him ball himself like a melon for an audience’s consumption and approval. I’ve seen him try to find a way to heal and a way to love himself and a way to make himself feel worthy of love. I love my brother. I want him to love himself. I want him to believe himself worthy of love.

But I am jealous. I want a father that is alive. I want a father that wants to call me. I want a father who is interested in who I am and what I think. I want a father who is proud of me.

I tell my mother this, and I sob. She’s only the second person I’ve admitted this to. The only person other than my wife that I’d trust with this. This deadly sin of mine. She tells me that it’s okay. That it’s not selfish of me. That it’s natural.

It does not make me feel better.

***

I lay in bed next to my wife. She’s on her computer, and I am staring at the ceiling. The grief crashes over me, and I feel like I’m drowning again. She closes her computer and wraps herself around me. She asks me what’s wrong. I don’t know how to verbalize to her. I don’t know how to tell her that I am scared.

My father was a murderer and addict who was never clean enough for me to really believe that he loved me, but I wanted to be proud of me. My grandfather was my hero but made his children feel like they weren’t loved for being who they were – that love had to be earned. I’m afraid that I am broken. I am afraid that if I ever become a father that my children will be broken too.

I come from a family of daddy issues. We all have them. If we dig deep enough, my grandmother thought her father was disinterested in parenting and didn’t care enough to give structure. My grandfather’s father was cold and closed off and wouldn’t help his son reach his dream of being a doctor.

I bury my face into my wife. This woman who loves me. This woman with her own daddy issues and her own trauma. This woman who loves me. This woman I have seen battle her own anxiety and depression and keeps pushing to become a woman that she could be proud of. This woman who loves me. This woman who wiped shit off of me when I pooped myself during surgery and the nurses didn’t really clean me. She kisses the top of my head, and she tells me that she loves me and that she’s here, and I know she’s here.

The tears subside and my breathing returns to normal, and I apologize, and my wife tells me that there is nothing to apologize for. She tells me that there is nothing to be ashamed of.

***

“How do I reconcile the two,” I ask my mother.

“You don’t have to,” she tells me, “Who he was to you and who he was to me don’t have to be reconciled. He loved you beyond words. He loved me, and I loved him. It wasn’t perfect. I had to forgive him. He did the best he knew how to do.”

***

I switch lanes on the rush-hour packed I-65. The sun is shining. My wife squeezes my knee.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

Photo of David P. Scaggs

BIO: David P. Staggs is a writer, teacher, and wrestling promoter from Indianapolis, Indiana. While native to Indiana, he has lived in Arkansas, Texas, California, and Ohio. He loves games of all sorts. He's an avid bowler and never turns down an ice-cold Root Beer (preferably with no sugar these days). He's previously been published by Cowboy Jamboree, Alien Buddha Press, Mr. Bull, and Rejection Lit, among others. He lives in the suburbs of Indianapolis with his wife and his zoo.