OYM Day 19: My Day In Court

I sat in a family courtroom and held a calculator in my trembling hands. The attorney was listing off numbers and I was supposed to add them up and give her the total. My fingers kept slipping and I noticed the backs of my legs were wet against the leather chair and I wished I had worn pants instead of a skirt. My eyes welled with tears and they spilled onto the buttons. I was falling behind and missing the numbers, breaths caught in my chest and I couldn’t gather the words to ask her to stop. The calculator fell from my hands and I started apologizing profusely.

“After a year of college, you should be able to operate a calculator, no?” His attorney rolled her eyes.

I put my head down and held myself. I closed my eyes so hard that I thought I might open them and be outside. He was right there, just 15 feet away from me and I hadn’t seen him in years. I wanted him to look at me, but I could barely bring myself to look at him, in fear he would be scowling. Or, even worse, he would pretend he didn’t see me, which is what he was doing, staring blankly at the wall in front of him.

The judge sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Can we do this after lunch please?” I apologized, again, and said I could continue.

The last time I had spoken to my father I was living in Arizona attending a small art school. My phone rang and I saw it was him. I ducked into the school bathroom for privacy and locked the door behind me. He told me not to contact him again and that he was disowning us, me and my 3 sisters. He said all we did was ask for money and he’d had enough. It was true. We did ask for money quite often. He owed thousands of dollars in child support for his kids and well… kids cost money. Clothes, food, school, healthcare… typical costs of having a child. I remember feeling defeated and just said “ok” and he hung up the phone. I threw up my lunch and sat on the toilet in silence.

I knew it was more than that, though. We were impeding on his relationship with his new wife. We were too much for her. I get it. Four teenage girls are a lot to handle. We spent every other weekend with my dad and it was torture to be in their house. At a certain point, none of us were allowed upstairs, as his new wife was convinced we were stealing from her. We weren’t. I saw him less and less until I finally moved away to Arizona for school.

I was testifying against him in court that day because he owed my mother back child support and he also had agreed to help me pay for college (I would pay 1/3, my mother 1/3, and my father 1/3). Of course, he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. He had never gone through the legalities of properly disowning his children, either, probably because that costs money.

His attorney didn’t need me to calculate the cost of my college education. She was just having me do it to be dramatic. She had the total cost on the paper in her hands and so did everyone else. I felt like an idiot. My head was swimming.

He won that day and he didn’t pay a dime for my college. The judge said because I never sent him my report cards, he would not have to help with funding. I didn’t know where my father lived, so I didn’t exactly see how that was possible. He and his wife had moved to a new house a year ago and didn’t bother to tell us where. I never looked for him, either. He told us not to.

He never looked at me that day. Not once, that I saw. And even though I am still not properly disowned, I’ll never love him like a child should love their father.

I later forgave him and tried to keep an open dialogue between us. We would talk a few times a year. He flagged down the wedding coordinator the day I got married, saying he must speak to me before I walked down the aisle. I came down the stairs and saw him and I felt my insides lurch. I invited him as a formality but hoped he wouldn’t show. Yet, there he was. He told me that I looked beautiful and that he was so proud of who I had become. He said it in a way…like I should be thankful to him. Or that it was partly his doing how I turned out. And I guess he’s right. It took me years to trust that my husband wouldn’t leave me, or disown me at noon on a Tuesday. Even now as we parent our 2-year-old daughter, I worry that he will leave us, because we are too much for him. Luckily, my husband is the complete opposite of my father and, well, not a coward. But still, he has to remind me every now and then that he is not my dad.

He also seeps into my daily life, in a subtle way that reminds me I’ll likely never be rid of his influence. I apologize. All the time. It annoys everyone. And I never want to explain why, because they won’t get it and I don’t want to look like a victim. But when you grew up being “in the way” a lot, you start feeling bad for existing at all. I apologized 100 times in court that day, for just being there.

I could never leave my child as my father left us. And I’ll never leave mine. I hope he gets the help he needs.

Maybe he can use the money he saved not helping me with college on a good therapist.