The title is, of course, from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Will’s dad finally shows up and then again leaves his kid and disappoints him yet again, and
walks out on him. Link here.
Somebody linked to this last week and I find I can’t watch it without crying. It certainly showcases Will Smith’s acting chops, but honestly, it just hits too close to home.
Because, really, how come they don’t want us? My mother I think wanted to keep me, but couldn’t due to society and the stigma of being an unwed mother. My father totally didn’t want me. It makes me so mad to think that it’s OK to seduce your student and get her pregnant but then run away from your responsibility.
I’ve never met my father. He never came to see me once. Why should he, he’s got sons and daughters of his own and I was just an accident.
I’m 36 years old now and I’m not looking for a father but I don’t the pain ever really washes clean.
I thought this could be a thread where some of us unwanted children could share our stories and maybe commiserate a bit.
Our circumstances are different but I feel there might be a common thread.
I’ve come to understand that my parents are both unrepentant narcissists. They didn’t/don’t want us because we require them to turn their attention from themselves.
Anaamika, my experience isn’t nearly as harsh as yours, but I share some of those feelings. My parents divorced when I was five. I saw my father sporadically for a few years, then he just stopped coming. When I was fourteen, he sent me a birthday gift out of the blue (a doll!) And that was the last I ever heard.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed this pattern, that every man I’ve personally known has abandoned his kids in some fashion…well, every man with one exception, my grandfather (died when I was young). I have heard of these things called “Dads”, but have no firsthand knowledge of any, and sometimes I feel a little bit sore about it.
My step-daughter’s about to have her first baby, and is also going through a divorce with the baby’s father. When she starts fretting about things like child support and visitation, I have to just step out of the room. I feel like telling her what I believe to be true, that there won’t ever be any of that.
On a similar, though somewhat different note with me, as it involves my maternal grandmother. I was the youngest child of somewhat older parents, so my grandparents were fairly old when I was born. My maternal grandfather died when I was a baby, and my paternal grandparents(somewhat boring, but doting) died within a year of one another when I was 18.
So my maternal grandmother is the only grandparent I have left. She is mentally ill, so not in the best of shape and hasn’t been for a while. But she has had very little contact with my mother ever since my mother converted to Christianity and married my father. She practically disowned my mother after this. And since I’ve been born, she has never sent my one birthday/Christmas card, congrats for graduating High School without ****ing up, nor any other occasion. I’ve learned to deal with the fact that she doesn’t want to acknowledge me, but it makes me sad that the one gradparent I still have kicking is the one who cares the least.
So very different than you, OP, but on a similar note. I’ve never understood people who don’t want their kids. To me, one accepts kids as a possible result of sex. No matter what, it might happen, so one should own up to that responsibility. And while I haven’t procreated(yet), I love my little nieces as my own, and would do anything to protect them. How can one see their child enter this world, and just not care? I don’t get it, I never will. And being a guy, I see way too many cases where the ‘man’ walks away, and every time I hear about it, I just bang my head and say WHY?!
Also, awsome Prince episode. It was the first one I ever watched, so I wasn’t prepared for the comedy present in most episodes.
My younger son is adopted. I’m pretty happy that he wasn’t wanted by biological parents. But I realize things don’t always work out this well. The problem is that one or both of your parents don’t know you. There are plenty of parents who don’t want their kids initially, and then after that it’s not necessarily a matter of want. I kind of despise parents who don’t live up to their responsibility to take care of their children. But some actually are doing the right thing by allowing someone who does want their children to have them. In that case I think those parents should leave and never return. I understand if you don’t know who your parent is you’d be curious, and could certainly understand if you feel there’s a hole in your life. But in reality you aren’t missing anything there. Hopefully you’ve found people in your life who care for you, and I’m very sorry you missed out on having that the traditional way. If it’s the right thing for you, maybe you can find that in the love and care you provide for your own children.
Just a quick note from the other sde. I know not every adoption works out well, but I can categorically state that being raised by the biological parents who don’t really want you never works out well. The best thing they could have done was to admit that they didn’t want us and give us to someone who did.
I think I wasn’t wanted simply because my parents were too young. They got married at 20 and within months my mother was pregnant. People were a lot more ignorant about birth control then. She wanted to abort me but that wasn’t legal then, and I’m sure my very devout Catholic father wouldn’t have approved.
My mother says that once she had me she wanted me, but I also know she has blamed me for everything wrong in her life.
My son’s father didn’t want him. The pregnancy was an accident, we were using birth control. He walked out when my son was 18 months old. He never had much to do with my son even when he was there. He did pay $200/month child support, it should have been more.
I started pet sitting when my son was about 3 and he would go with me a lot of the time. We’d talk about the different dogs and cats, and which had ‘mommies’, which had ‘daddies’ and which had ‘both’.
One day when he was 4 we were talking about mommies and daddies he said, ‘I must have been a really bad boy for my daddy to hate me so much he never comes to see me’.
I have never hated anybody as much as I hated his father that day.
That son of a bitch would live with other women who had kids and he would play with their kids, take care of their kids and not even acknowledge his own son.
So I told my son that it wasn’t his fault, that his daddy is sick (I figure anybody who can walk away from their own child and never look back has to be one sick mf’er), and his father is doing the best thing for him by staying away until he gets well.
His father started coming around when my son was 9, but he died less than a year later.
I’m sorry my son lost his father but I’m glad I never have to deal with the SOB again.
Oh god, this breaks my heart. I remember that feeling, though I was a lot older when I found out. I found out when I was fourteen I was adopted, and it wasn’t until I was much, much older I found out any details about my father at all. For me it was “Is it because I was a girl? If I’d been a boy would he have moved heaven and earth to keep me? Or didn’t it matter at all?”
My adoptive parents loved me somewhat (they were my aunt and uncle) but many, many times after I found out I got screamed in my face “You’re only my duty, after all! I took you in because it was my duty!”
When my [adoptive] mom died two years ago none of this had remotely been cleaned up. But even worse was my real mom, who is still in touch with us, didn’t even call my dad to express condolences, let alone me.
My real mom did the right thing by giving me up, I agree with those of you who said that. However, she came back into my life in pretty much one of the most traumatic ways. I’ve told this story before, but what the hell: Like Will Smith, she showed up one day out of the blue. I was at my my cousin’s house. She spent the whole day there (building up nerve?) and then as she was leaving, drew me into another room and said,
“I need to tell you something. You are not [her] daughter. You are my daughter. I’m telling you this because [she] is growing increasingly selfish.”
And then hugged me once, and walked out of my life for the next ten years.
I forgave her long ago for giving me up. I’ve never forgiven her for coming out of nowhere to tell me essentially just to hurt my adoptive mom.
I’m anxious to hear some of the responses to this thread. I grew up with a loving father, however I’m in a situation now where my daughter will not. I just want to make sure I say the right things and make sure she understands that there’s nothing wrong with her. So hearing from people who have actually gone through it might give me some ideas.
I’ll spare you all my own David Copperfield kind of crap, but yes, I can really reflect on what a lot of you have written here.
All I’ll say is that everything happens for a reason; and if I look back for those reasons, I can rationally forgive. Not cop an attitude that I’m oh so superior and forgiving; but that I have committed to undertake the hard work of forgiveness.
Beyond having a reason, everything can have a purpose, but that purpose is up to us. People can use suffering as an excuse to be assholes; so neglect and abuse becomes “the gift that keeps on giving,” spanning the generations. Alternately, suffering, if handled as best as possible, can have the purpose of making us better people.
I’m adopted, too. I’ve moved past the “why didn’t she want me”, but still stumble on the father part - he was her college professor and I was born in late May. He had to have seen my biomom expand throughout the year.
TheKid has had a lot of issues with her dad. He was in and out of her life from the time she was born until about three years ago - we’ve had no contact with him at all. I explained to her that he wasn’t mature enough to take responsibility for having a child. It, of course, hasn’t stopped him from having them with other women - and he doesn’t stay with them either. Logically, she understands that her dad should have never had kids, but emotionally it still bothers her.
My sister and I haven’t had contact with our father for nearly 15 years. My sister’s getting married next year, so his absence cuts especially deep right now.
When people ask me why I’m estranged from my dad, I wish I could say “He’s a drunk” or “He hit us” or “He’s in jail.” All those stories are terrible, but at least they are legitimate reasons why my father isn’t in my life. It’s terrible to have to say “He’s just not interested in us, never was, even when my parents were married.”
My sister and I were good kids. Great kids, even. Honor roll, in the band, in school plays, polite and friendly. And we’re normal, fully functioning adults. We have jobs, pets, respectable significant others, responsible drinking habits. We are kids most parents would be proud to have and my mom is so, so proud of us. So, yes, we are always asking “how come he don’t want me?”
One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is:
We all have our stories
Despite our stories, we’re all essentially the same
I have to wonder what stories these absentee parents are running in their heads to make them do what they did. While I hate the fact that they abandoned you guys, I can’t help but feel a little pity for them.
I tell TheKid that her father is the one who has lost out. He has missed all of her milestones, all of the things that have made me proud to be her Mom. She had my dad as a strong male influence. She has male cousins who love her dearly and would pretty much do anything for her. Her godfather has been her dad emotionally for the past few years. She has contact with the non-toxic members of his family. In many ways, him not being around has been good for her in that where one failed, a bevy have filled that void in all but name.
I have some pity for my mother, despite what she did. I mean, she:
lost her own mom when she was only a child
they were dirt poor growing up
she was the baby of the family and no one really had time for her, what with there being no mom
she was just looking for love, after all. I felt the same way growing up. It’s a dysfunctional old world.
I can find some measure of empathy for my father, but it’s very small. His reputation would have been ruined if it had ever come out he’d had a child out of wedlock…but it’s really easy to control your dick, and it wasn’t his life that was ruined by my birth, just my mom’s.
Dad wanted us; he sometimes didn’t understand us, we sometimes frustrated him horribly (best expressed by a line he picked from his mother, raising his eyes to the Heavens and saying “my grandchildren shall avenge me”), but he had wanted children and he accepted that those children happened to be us - warts, flash tempers, bad eyesight and all. Mom wanted children, but she didn’t want us, she wanted some other children (specially true for Middlebro and yours truly; Littlebro is close enough to her mental image to be acceptable to her, but she never really acknowledges his reality). I suddenly became acceptable when Mom’s best friend and I pointed out that my sister in law, who Mom can’t stand, is actually, exactly, like Mom’s dream daughter - all of a sudden, things such as “having a non-girly daughter who performs honey-do’s with screwdrivers and hammers” became valuable. But by that point I’d stopped giving much of a shit about her approval…
I have to wonder if she’s just playing that out in new ways. It can be really hard to uproot all of the old crap, and it continues to come out in some way or other.
I felt like I wasn’t wanted by my mother, because she was never happy with anything I did. I found out later I was conceived by rape, so I guess I get it. She swears I am the best thing that ever happened to her, but she was really traumatized by being a single parent so young (19) that I think having me messed her up quite a bit. And you know, she had this rage, this indescribable rage toward me that even today I still cannot make sense of. I mean she would scream insults at me until I started crying and then she would make fun of me for crying (and become further enraged.) I remember very young writing her a letter of apology for something I had done, and she ripped it up in my face. “Talk is cheap,” she said. I was what - 7 years old? We have a good relationship today but it hurts to remember, not just a painful memory but this deep existential part of my being, this feeling of complete and total abandonment, that can never be erased.
Then there’s my bio Dad, who basically abandoned me for alcohol. ''You’re just going to have to accept that your Dad is an alcoholic," he said. I saw him on the weekends and then less frequently as I got older. I remember it had been months and he finally got a ride to come see me and he showed up drunk. I don’t even know what my father is like without alcohol in his system. But he made his choice, and he ended up having his parental rights terminated and I didn’t talk to him for a decade. We see one another occasionally, and as usual he goes on and on about how important I am to him, I’m his only reason for living blah blah blah. But I feel nothing. Nothing but guilt for that lack of feeling.
