black history/futures: families
10 Feb 2019families
(how) was i supposed to know?
he knew his parents. i assumed that was enough. for fuck’s sake: i didn’t even know my father. wasn’t what i gave him so much better? at least me and his father stayed together to raise him. that should have been enough. now he claims we crushed him by withholding information.
my youngest child, 6th in my progeny, is claiming me and his father crushed him by making believe he was someone he’s not. and by not allowing him to know who he actually is.
what’s the big deal? so we didn’t tell him that the people he knew as his grandfathers, on both sides, weren’t his biological grandfathers. so what. wouldn’t it have been better to believe that the loving men who stayed were your blood rather than the sex-addicted men who didn’t want any responsibility?
he said to me that it would have been much better for him to know what his actual blood was. he said that it wouldn’t have made him so surprised and frustrated by what he had to deal with.
if only he had known, he says, he wouldn’t have had three kids by age 24.
is that true?
i guess we’ll never know. but i still think i made the right choice. he was going to figure it out someday. why tell him before he really it?
what are we doing to do with three little ones, though? do we have to tell them as soon as they can speak and think? dear lord, i hope they take the stupid family tree exercise out of schools by then. i stand by my choice, but i did hate lying to him about what our tree looked like…
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