Dashed Paternity - Prose
I have had two fathers and I have been cast off by both of them. From my perch, it seems as if both of them were easily able to cast me aside - one because of his own mental deficiencies, and the other because I manifested my failures in front of him. Both had professed undying love and paternity. One was biological and God-given. The other was spiritual and also God-given. My father, my Dad, has not lived in the same home with me since I was a teen. He was ejected from the family home in a horrifying evening of abuse and recompense. It was a few months after that when we began to heal the relationship. Over the next twenty years, there were periods of drought and periods of festal joy in our relationship. When the judgment for his state mandated quarantine was passed, I became his loving correspondent. When life’s happenstance returned us to within a driving distance, we visited each other more often. By that time, I was a daddy too....