Legacy

It almost always happens in a doctor’s office. Is there a history of ____ in your family? Has anyone ever had diabetes or heart disease?

I am quick to recite the illnesses in my mother’s family. Then I am silent.

I didn’t know my father, I offer.

The doctor stares at me, with some mixture of surprise and pity, as I stare at my hands, twisting around each other in my lap.

At 55, I’m still ashamed about my father’s absence, and I don’t know why. It’s not my fault that his marriage to my mother didn’t make it out of the starting gate. 

I don’t know why I feel humiliated when it was she who was belittled and battered. I should feel proud of her for having had the sense to pack us up and leave.

Still, it would be nice to be able to say my parents divorced or my father died when I was young, instead of, I only met my father twice (and that’s because the courts ordered it). After that second visit, I never saw him again. He never even tried to see me.

That could make a kid feel unlovable.

Maybe that’s where the shame comes from.