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Absent Fathers

Reflections by Belia Mayeno Choy, Shane O'Cadja Nash, Edward John Quilice

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By Belia Mayeno Choy, Shane O'Cadja Nash, Edward John Quilice
Produced by Belia Mayeno Choy

Federal agents are conducting a nationwide search for fathers who owe millions of dollars in child support. They're looking to arrest more than a hundred deadbeat dads, and law enforcement officials expect the numbers to grow as the investigations continue. Besides the financial price of parents' absence from their children's lives, there is also an emotional cost. Youth Radio's Belia Mayeno Choy provides a snapshot of the experience of young people growing up with only one parent. She sent these reflections on absent fathers.

Belia: I only have one picture of my father. It's an expired Texas driver's license with an old grainy photo. Height: 5'6. Eyes: Brown. Hair: Black. I can see I have his dimples, and how his ears stick out just like mine. But there's no room on the card for his laugh, or the smell of his Drakkar cologne, or how he'd always bring me a bag of peanut M&Ms when he went to the store for a 12-pack. Luckily, there's also no room on the card for the way he made my mom cry when he slapped her, or all the times he promised to send me birthday cards that never appeared. I just can't build my dad out of a wallet-sized piece of plastic.

Ed: I remember my father, I remember what he looks like, my relationship with him. I wouldn't even say that it even existed, he was around but mostly my brother and I were afraid of him most of the time. One thing that I remember particularly about my father is that no matter where he was, outside, or in the house or wherever, he would always have an eight inch buck knife strapped to his hip. I only remember the segment from his ribs to his knees of his body, zeroing in on that knife and just watching him walk around with that.

Shane: My dad died this year. He hadn't really been in my life since I was seven years old. I guess he was simultaneously one of the best things that ever happened to me and one of the worst things. My dad was an alcoholic and he liked to drink a lot, and so there was nothing I could really do to combat him, so in my little passive-aggressive methods were peeing in his alcohol and wiping my butt with his ties. My mother is like my father in many logistical ways, but she's not — she can't be fatherly. So that spot is very vacant.

Belia: When I have a baby in my arms, somehow I always end up speaking in cooing Spanish. "No llore, m'ija." Don't cry daughter. "Tienes sueno mi chiquitica?" Are you sleepy my little girl? I don't speak fluent Spanish now, but I know when I am near a little one, some piece of me remembers when my father held me and talked to me in the language of his parents and ancestors. But the link that connected me to my Latin heritage feels like it broke when he left. Sometimes my Latino friends talk about the heavenly taste of Birria, or make puns that only make sense when spoken in Spanish, and I am lost. Other people can see my ethnicity in the waves of my black hair, and the curves of my indio cheekbones, but I wonder if there is any true Latina in me, since my father wasn't there to water the seed he planted. Even if I did know my dad's phone number, I still couldn't call and ask what I really want to know. There is no easy answer to what it means to be a "real" Mexicana. How can I ever know myself if there is so much that I don't know about my own blood?

Shane: Most of my friends' fathers aren't in their lives. So, in a way we kinda all fed off each other — we took like the 10 separate pieces and tried to form a masculine identity that we could all share. So I guess we kinda pieced together what each of us knew and figured out what a father should be and what we could have gotten out of a father.

Ed: The only male figure that I've had was my brother who was adopted by my grandmother 11 years before I was born. To me he was my saving grace, he was everything that I wanted to be. He taught me about acceptance and open-mindedness, even everything down to sex — and it often wasn't the best advice, but still it was what I had and I trusted him and I still do.

Shane: It was really cool, sometimes what he would do is, he would pull me into the kitchen and he would like periodically he would be like, how does it feel to be eight? And I would tell him, and he'd say this is how feel when I was eight. And it was cool because it was just a way to check in and ask me how I was feeling. At that point in my life it was a way for him to check in with me and a way for me to check in on myself, and I was always thought that was really nice, and he always seemed to be really genuine. I loved him, I really really did love him.

Belia: When I was six I used to have a small black notebook where I wrote plays with my dad and me as the main characters. We had lots of conversations in my imagination, and he said all the things I wished he would say if he had been there. I told him about the strange bugs I found in the backyard and he congratulated me on learning my multiplication tables — all in my make-believe world. But even then, I didn't wish for him. The reality of his presence would have meant hearing him yell at my mother because she didn't buy the right kind of mayonnaise, or being told to shut up when I talked to him while he was drinking with his rowdy friends. He had to leave — so I could grow up without fear.

Ed: I didn't know that children grew up not being beaten by their parents and not having their parents have Hell's Angel parties in their house and be snorting speed off coffee tables. I thought that this was life and this was the way it goes, and I just have to deal with it and be strong. I remember vividly having those feeling when I was like four years old.

Shane: After my parents got divorced my dad would tell me in great detail how he was gonna kill my mother and so I would always come home and think that I was gonna find her dead. I couldn't get in the house quick enough to find out if my mother was alive and every time I did I was just so thankful to make sure everything was ok, but I just had a knot in my stomach whenever I would come home for years and years.

Belia: When my sister and I went to visit my dad when we were little girls, he would lock us in the bedroom all day and leave the house. After hours of peering through the iron window bars trying to see him come back down the street, we started to make up games to entertain ourselves until he came home. We made our own circus, with a tightrope made of shoelaces tied end-to-end and tacked to the walls, and balled up socks for the clowns to juggle. We somersaulted off the bed and yelled through the whirring blades of the portable fan so our voices would bellow like ringmasters. When we had exhausted ourselves and were falling asleep, my sister asked in her tiny voice, "Why isn't he coming?" My little monkey brown hand held her chubby one and I said, with the feeling that my stomach was ripping in half, "I don't know." More than ten years later, I still don't know why he never came.

Ed: I kinda just let go of my father. I just didn't have one, and often times, I wonder, when I see my friends hanging out with their dads am I missing out? I wonder what it would have been like if I had had a normal father, or if I had someone to have that bond with. But I didn't, so I don't even know where to start, or what to think I should be compensating for.

Belia: I don't know what I'd say to my father. He's a stranger to me, an ever-present silhouette. It couldn't just be one thing. I'd say I hate you. Because I never got to know what it feels like to have someone look at the two of us and say to themselves, just as an almost unconscious passing thought "That is a father and a daughter." I'd say I love you. Because the pearls of your DNA are half of my sister and me, and I need to believe you love us too, even from thousands of silent miles away. I'd say thank you. Because your presence and your absence are both chains and wings. Even though I don't know which one is which, I do know I wouldn't be who I am without you.

Host Back Announce: The reflections of Belia Mayeno Choy, Shane O'Cadja Nash, Edward John Quilice. Absent Fathers was produced by Youth Radio.