How I Want My Sperm Donor Father Informed of My Death

This is part two of my "When I Die" instructions.  Part one is here.  I had an idea recently.  I'm not sure if I actually want this done or not, but in case I decide in this plan's favor, here are the detailed instructions.  If I die before I can decide, I leave the decision making up to my BFF Jerry and her superior sense of mischief.

I have some feelings about the fact that my biological father will probably never speak to me in my lifetime.  I wrote to him, and he wrote back asking me never to contact him again, and that's where we are.  Probably forever.  Other donor conceived people have explained how they wore down their biological families with patience and kindness and regularly scheduled holiday cards, but I can't fathom having the guts to reach out to him a second time after he expressly asked me never to contact him again.

If I die before he does, I would like a large box (large enough I could fit inside it if I wrapped my arms around my knees and ducked my head) shipped to him.  Ideally at the hospital where he works, signature required.  It should be filled with helium balloons so that they rise up out of the box unexpectedly when it is opened.  There should also be an expensive, high end note card in an envelope at the bottom of the box.  The note should read as follows:

Surprise!  

If you are reading this card, it means I am dead. 
Since news of my existence did not seem to bring you any pleasure, hopefully news of my newly minted lack of existence brings you some relief. 
I complied with with your wish never to hear from me again in the hope I might someday hear from you.  You went my entire life without speaking to me.  

Congratulations!  You did it!

Each balloon should also contain at least two tablespoons of glitter so that, if someone pops them (ideally in a fit of rage or shame), they get an extra surprise.

The note card should probably also have my name followed by the parenthetical "(your biological daughter)" on it somewhere just in case he doesn't know who it's from.

My Dad's Dish Network password finally stopped working

Nine months after my dad died, his Dish Network password has officially stopped working.  It allowed me to stream literally every show I've ever tried to watch that wasn't already on Netflix or Amazon Prime, including HBO.  That login was my inheritance, and while I knew it was only temporary, I am grateful he let me use it both in life and in death.  I gave it to everyone who asked, and it touched the lives of at least three families who mostly just wanted to watch Game of Thrones.  It will be missed.

I'm wondering what Dante is using for entertainment now.  My dad's Comcast password isn't working anymore either (yes, he had both at one point, my parents made bad choices).  I'm also wondering if Dante still lives at the house.  I haven't checked real estate listings and foreclosures lately.

The Time My Mother Gave Her In-Laws a Dog

A few years into my grandfather's dementia, my mother decided what he really needed was a dog.  My dad's dad had Alzheimer's, and my grandmother took care of him at home.  He had reached the stage where he believed he was in prison and his wife was his jailer, but he hadn't reached the stage where it was taking a toll on his physical body yet.  In short, he spent a lot of time running away from home, and my grandmother spent a lot of time retrieving him.

My mother saw an ad for a free, unwanted, adult dog in a local Penny Saver and determined the deal was too good to pass up.  The people who were holding the dog said they had found him by the side of the road, so he had already been abandoned at least once before and, based on his behavior, abused as well.  He snapped at people, he was incredibly thin, and there appeared to be something wrong with his skin that resembled eczema. 

My mother gave the dog to her mother-in-law with the explanation that it was to keep my grandfather occupied.  My grandmother accepted the unwanted dog graciously, I presume because she didn't know what else to do.  Then every time my grandfather fled his "jail," Max the dog took off as well.  My grandmother would drive after them, coaxing each into the car with cold hotdogs.  Eventually she told my mother she couldn't do it anymore.  Max created twice the work for her, and she couldn't take care of him anymore.  He became our household's second dog.  Our first dog, Angel, was a sweet dispositioned Cocker Spaniel who we had raised from puppyhood.

I don't remember if it was before Max went to live with my grandparents or after he came back to our house that he mauled me.  He was still new to me, it hadn't occurred to me to be wary of him, and I had leaned down to hug him good night before going to bed like I always did Angel.  I was nine years old.  He had been asleep, I had startled him, and he had woken up taking a small chunk out of my face.  My dad said something along the lines of, "Of course you got bit.  He was asleep," and indicated he'd known exactly what was going to happen when he saw me getting too close to the dog sleeping at his feet.  I wanted to ask why he hadn't said something.  Why hadn't he warned me if he knew this would happen?  Angel didn't bite when I did the same thing.  I didn't know I "had it coming" by hugging the new dog.  Our conversation was cut short when my mother took me to the hospital to get stitches.   

"I Wish SHE Were My Daughter"

When I was in college, my high school friend Allie told me she and her sisters had saved up $10,000 over the years from the monthly allowance their parents gave them, and they were giving it to their mother for her birthday.  She had been wanting to re-carpet the house or something she considered frivolous, so they were stipulating that she had to spend it on something frivolous and couldn't spend it paying bills.  When this news got back to my mother, she caught my eye and told me pointedly, "I wish ALLIE were my daughter."

I don't remember being offended by the comment or taking it personally.  It was sort of typical of my mother.  She may as well have said, "I'm hoping to guilt you into giving me money."  I also knew Allie and her sisters all received substantially more in allowance than my parents had ever given me and that, had Allie been my mother's daughter, she would have had nothing to give her.  Knowing that helped. 

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

Homemade Gifts

When I was little, I used to make my family members gifts for holidays and their birthdays.  I think this is pretty typical for small children with zero income.  The stress that came from giving my mother gifts started when I was too young to remember.  If I drew a picture, she tended to mention how much better at drawing Dante had been than me even as a small child.  When I stopped drawing pictures and took to just coloring straight lines and shapes in the hopes of avoiding criticism, she told me my drawings were boring and that no one wanted to look at brightly colored lines.  Again, she would point to Dante's drawings (literally) as an example of what was good.  I could copy what he'd drawn at my age easily enough -- such things were still on my grandmother's refrigerator seven years later (hence the literal pointing) -- but doing anything Dante had done first was considered boring too. 

In school around the holidays, we often made things like "pencil holders" by decorating old tin cans, which I would eagerly offer up and my mother would accept with the sarcastic reply, "Great.  Another pencil can."  (It's not like she had more than she could use either.  Do you have any idea how many pencils you can find in a hoard house?  They are infinite.) 

When I learned to sew in elementary school and took to sewing and embroidering small throw pillows because it was all I knew how to make from the tiny scraps of fabric I could get my hands on, they prompted a disparaging snort and the similar response, "Great.  Another pillow."  That was around the time I started saving up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy proper gifts for my family.  I knew only babies made homemade gifts and that no one liked them anyway.  That point was very clear at my house.  That was the year my mother ridiculed me for buying her gifts at the Dollar Store.  It was around the same time Dante started stealing from me.  Childhood is the worst.

Happy Birthday To You

My parents stopped giving me birthday and Christmas gifts when I was in my 20s, and I'm not entirely sure why.  With my mother, it was a blessing, partly because I couldn't say "thank you" enough times or in enough ways to prevent her getting angry and yelling at me for being ungrateful.  It was also a blessing because the things she'd sent me were crazy -- mostly heavy boxes full of random crap she had bought on sale or in the Target dollar aisle.  Sometimes there were small toys intended for small children, which seemed to be how she still saw me.  My mother stopped acknowledging my birthday (or any holidays) about a year before I ceased contact with her, and about six months before I stopped acknowledging hers.  This may have been an intended slight on her part, but it was just as likely a side effect of being depressed and so mentally inept that she didn't acknowledge much of anything.

The last time my dad (social, non-bio father) gave me a gift was later, just before my daughter was born.  I don't know if he has some kind of belief that people with kids are too old to receive gifts (though I was sending *him* gifts until a year after that) or if I'd unwittingly upset him somehow, or if he felt slighted by my daughter's existence, or why he stopped sending me anything -- I have an Amazon wish list after all, and it requires very little thought to select something off of it like he previously had -- but that was the last time I received anything from either of my parents. 

I realized a couple years ago that the only way to maintain a relationship with my dad without resenting him was if I stopped putting more energy in than I was getting back out.  I quickly learned that that meant putting no thought or energy whatsoever into our relationship.  He wanted me to do him favors, handle his finances, be his emergency contact on all his paperwork, but he wouldn't call me.  He wouldn't email me unless I emailed him first, and our emails centered around whatever personal complaints he had and whatever he'd been watching on TV.  If I said something about my daughter, his only grandchild, he usually ignored it.  If I said something about my life or my interests, he usually ignored it.  I told him I was happy to help him out but that I wanted him to start prefacing his requests with, "How are you?" or "How is the baby?" and that it hurt my feelings that he didn't acknowledge her, or me really.  He said he understood and would do better, but nothing changed. 

That was when I made him take over his own finances.  There was no reason he couldn't manage them himself anyway, beyond the fact that he never had.  I stopped giving him personal information since he didn't acknowledge it, and I stopped asking him questions in my emails because I didn't see the need to keep drawing out the conversations about TV shows I'd never seen and foods he currently hates.  I just responded to the things he said and the (very rare) questions.  I tried not to take his lack of interest in me personally and instead looked at our exchanges like an anthropological study.  Our communication tapered off. 

Now I acknowledge his birthday and Father's Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas with a "Happy [Holiday], Dad!" email in which that line is both the subject and the entirety of the body.  I can do that without thinking about it, so I'm willing to put in that much effort, at least for now. 

For my birthday this year, he sent me the following email:

"Happy Birthday!  At least you're still young enough to enjoy it."

I replied, "Thanks!"

This is the relationship I used to wish I could have with my mother, when I still bothered wishing for anything in regard to her.

Father's Day for the Donor Conceived

Father's Day hits a lot of donor conceived people hard.  This will be my first Father's Day knowing who my biological father is.  We aren't in touch.  There is no question of if I should reach out to him or send him something -- he said he wants nothing to do with me, so he will never hear from me again.  I wonder if his Real Children will say anything about him on Facebook that day.  We're Facebook friends, my younger half-siblings and I.  I'd like to see more old photos of him, hear facts about what he's like as a person, but I don't expect them to say anything about him to me or on social media.  They post a lot, but the last time either of them posted photos of our father to social media was close to a decade ago.  I can't believe Facebook has been around for so long.

I won't be reaching out to my dad -- my non-biological social father -- on Father's Day either.  I made a decision not to spend more on that relationship than I get out of it, and not to do anything that will make me feel resentful of the fact that he seems mostly indifferent toward me.  Initially that meant I wouldn't manage his finances anymore or do him favors unless he occasionally prefaced his requests with "how are you?" or acknowledged my daughter's existence.  I told him I wanted him to ask after me and my daughter.  He said okay, but he never did it.  His messages were about doing things for him, so they could have been to anyone. 

It took time and effort to turn the reins of his finances over to him, but it saved me a lot of time and effort soon thereafter.  I also appreciate not having to watch him squander his new savings on tens of thousands of dollars of music equipment and a car he can't drive and -- for some unknown reason -- a collection of over one hundred pipes.  Hoarders need their collections, I guess.

A year or two ago, I decided I could afford mentally and emotionally to send greetings on holidays and his birthday.  Email only, and never more than a line of text because that was how much I could do without having to think about it.  That was how much I could do without starting to feel bad.  But even that much started to feel like a drain.  Last Thanksgiving I realized I didn't even want to expend that minimal amount of energy trying to stay in contact.  I would respond to anything he sent me, but I wasn't going to struggle to keep this relationship alive.  The 2014 holiday season passed with not a word between us.  Surprisingly, it felt good to me.  I had more energy to spend with friends and family who are pleasant and seem to love me.

Father's Day has never been particularly hard for me.  I've been lucky that way.  My dad always accepted gifts from me with a smile, so the holiday never held the stress or looming threat of Mother's Day.  This year my daughter is old enough to color a card and help make plans.  I mentioned the possibility of taking her dad out for ice cream, and she hasn't stopped talking about it.  Maybe we'll make pizza or go out for lunch too.  My husband never has expectations for holidays, so we'll do something simple and have fun together, like we do for Mother's Day.  I expect my brother Hans will have similar traditions.  He's a father too now.  I expect I'll see a photo of him and his son on Facebook this Sunday.  I wonder what my sister will do.  I wonder if they'll call our father privately, or send him a card or a gift.  I wonder how he responds to cards and gifts and phone calls.  I wonder what he's like.

I hope he thinks of me.  He is my father, after all, regardless of how he looks at the situation.  I don't recall thinking of my biological father much on Father's Day in the past, but this is the first year my father has been a specific person, rather than some nebulous idea.  He's Joseph Von Trapp now, rather than "a doctor with blue eyes who is a probably good at math."  It's strangely new and real, having a person for a father, and I think of him.  I don't expect him ever to care for me, but I want him to think of me occasionally too, even if it's with regret.  Regret would be better than nothing.  Regret would mean I'm real to him too.

How My Mother Spent My College Fund: Part 1

When I was little, I remember my mother telling me I had a savings account.  She said my dad put $1k in it towards college each year, which would yield a good amount for a college fund back in that day.  I must've been about five at the time because she said there was currently $5k in it, and that my brother, Dante, had a comparable savings account too. 

I remember asking about my savings account when I was a little older, and my mother said it had $5k in it.  I wondered why my dad had stopped putting money in the account, but I didn't question it.  I didn't want either of my parents to yell at me.

I knew Dante's savings account had paid for three things:  a new bedroom set when his bed broke, sessions with a child psychologist, and a very old Mustang that our mother had bought and presented to him as a gift. 

I don't know where my savings account went.  When I started getting my college financing lined up at age 18, I asked my mother about it and she said the money was gone.  Later, when I was grown and started talking with my dad on the phone, I asked him what year he had stopped putting money into the account.  He said he hadn't. 

Why I Stopped Giving My Mother Gifts

I have known for as long as I can remember that I am terrible at picking out gifts for my mother.  She does not like to ask for things in particular because she wants her gifts to be a surprise, but she also wants them to be exactly what she wants.  She says that it is the thought that counts; therefore if we'd put enough thought into our gifts, we would have been able to pick out the right ones.

When I was in my early 20s she said she wanted a foot massager that could do pressure point foot massages.  The closest thing I could find in person or online at the time was a massaging foot bath from Brookstone, so I bought it.  The moment she unwrapped it she said it was wrong, not what she wanted at all, and that I should return it immediately and give her a Walmart gift card instead because keeping the foot bath would just be a waste of my money.  I had asked her all through college for gift cards for birthdays and Christmas because I did not have enough money for new clothes, but she had always told me she couldn't afford to give me gift cards.  Instead she'd sent me large boxes of toys and other useless sundries, like a keychain with a babydoll on the end and a plastic circle for pressing the water out of canned tuna.  Each box must've totaled $50-100, possibly more after shipping.  So I returned the foot bath and got my money back, and I kept it. 

The next year I just sent her flowers and a card.  She had ordered flowers for me for every birthday since I turned a year old, plus Valentine's Day and other holidays.  She said the flowers arrived in a box and not already arranged in a vase.  Ordering flowers online was a new phenomenon, and I'd unwittingly sent her flowers that she had to arrange after they arrived.  She didn't even know people did that.  The next year she told me not to send her some stupid waste of money like flowers -- she wanted gift cards, so I should just send her gift cards.  I just sent her a card.  I sent her just a card for every holiday until she had ignored a couple of my birthdays and Christmases, and then I stopped.

Mother's Day Gifts

When I was eight, I was delighted to discover The Dollar Store because it was finally somewhere where I could afford the merchandise with birthday money.  My mother had a collection of ceramic knickknacks in a glass curio cabinet, so I used the money I had saved up to buy her a Mother's Day gift of a few Dollar Store ceramic knickknacks I thought were particularly beautiful.  I was very proud of my selections and felt like such a grownup for being able to buy a proper Mother's Day gift.

I did not know the white bell with doves on top was meant to be a wedding knickknack until my mother told me so.  I was so ashamed.  I'd had no idea.  Since when were birds and bells reserved for weddings?  My mother had a non-wedding-related bell in the curio cabinet already.  Then she picked up the phone and called her own mother and said, "Guess who discovered The Dollar Store," and went on to disparage my choice of store and gifts to my grandmother while I stood there looking on.