I spent a few hours tonight trying to find something out about my family. I'm illegitimate. I don't appear in records for my father's side of the family, and neither does my mother. I disowned my father several years ago because he's dishonorable. He cheated on his wife with my mother. That wasn't how I was born-- I was born a couple of years before he married his wife. It's just he kept fucking my mother afterward.

I can't get a straight story out of either my mother or father regarding what their agreement was-- about me, about their relationship before and after he married. My mother says he led her on. My father says she knew it was unlikely they would ever get back together. I've had a few years to get to know my mother as a person, and my father ought to know that she's got a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality. He decided this warranted no obligation on his part. I decided this makes him dishonorable.

When they found out my mother was pregnant, my father wanted her to have an abortion. I can't say I blame him. My mother wanted to keep me. According to my mother, the agreement was that I could be born if my father could abdicate all responsibility for raising me. My father says that my mother wanted to raise me entirely on her own, and that he had to talk her into taking child support. Regardless, after my mother did all the difficult work of raising and caring for me, with minimal support from my father, he wanted to be part of my life again. I find that disgusts me.

I rarely appear in records for my mother's side of the extended family, for her father more or less disowned her because of me... me and a few other things, centering around the theme of disobedience. She disobeyed him, so he made her an outcast... if he'd known I was illegitimate it would have been far worse. I disowned my mother several years ago, because she reached a point where she felt abusing me was the best way to show her concern. She disapproved violently of the course my life was taking, but offered nothing resembling intelligent guidance. I also disowned her because she is a fool.

On my father's side of the family, I do not so much as know what his parents' names were. I've never met any of his relatives. He might very well have no living relations. I know he has another daughter someplace. I don't know if she's legitimate or not. He and his wife haven't had kids. My father has Alzheimer's disease and by now might not know who his relatives are. I've asked him to tell me his life story, but he never replied. He knows how unhappy I am with him.

On my mother's side, I know my grandmother, an uncle, a cousin. I knew my grandfather, but he's dead now. I wasn't sorry to see him go. My cousin was a jerk when I met him, and presumably still is. My uncle seemed like a nice guy, but he let my mother take care of my grandmother on her own (she and my grandfather divorced not long after I was born), when he was much better off financially. My extended family all seem to work in investment or law firms and are presumably rich. They mean nothing to me, and the idea that they ought to is an alien concept... it's not hard to see how things got that way if you really look at them.

Despite this, tonight I was trying to find some information about my family. Mostly my father's side of it. I just wanted to find something that proved he was born and had parents. All I know is my father's name and that he might have come from Missouri. I didn't find anything.

I did a little searching on my mother's side, but that seems pointless, since they shut me out years ago. Maybe my uncle was nice to me, but that's what it amounts to. According to my grandfather, I was the result of my mother's disobedience, and what he decreed is what they followed. Maybe he never said it out loud, but given his central role, his influence over them all, that's what it amounts to.

I don't really have a history. One side of my family is a blank, and the other shut me out. My father dropped in very rarely, to throw money at me and screw my mother. He missed my high school graduation, college graduation, my awards, everything that mattered. If he despised me and didn't want to see me, that would have been better than all the broken promises. By the end I didn't miss him, I aspired to his destruction, and if there's such a thing as a curse, what he has now is my fault.

My mother moved us around constantly when I was a kid, and I hardly saw her at all when I was little, because she worked nights. For a while she left me with sitters, until we moved in with my grandmother. My mother wonders why I left, and why I don't feel close to her, how I could stay away from her and my grandmother all this time. I told you she was a fool.

I don't know if I'm entitled to sympathy because of all this. For me it just is. I don't feel sad that I don't have a history, I just notice the absence of it at times, and even then not often. It's strange to think that most people keep track of all their relations, and show affection and respect to people they don't even know, because of shared blood. It isn't something I want. It's just sometimes I notice it isn't there.