Searching for Sea Glass: A Therapist Searches for Three Fathers and Finds Herself
I had three different fathers and lost them all. Then I found them all again, in different ways, and wrote about the experience.
Here are some samples from the book:
My childhood kitchen was a study in do-it-yourself gone wrong. Countertop ceramic tiles in egg yolk yellow argued with cabinets stained so dark you could barely see the wood grain. The floor was, inexplicably, covered by a chocolate-brown indoor-outdoor carpet, and bright yellow and orange cartoon-style flowers grew in a wallpaper border above the cabinets. A bright white refrigerator stood out from all of the rest like a marshmallow in a cup of hot cocoa served in a 70’s flowered mug. The overall effect was what I imagined the inside of the Keebler Elf tree house would look like.
I knew my mother most fully in the same way she knew herself, through her passionate focus on her work. Some of my earliest memories are of her sketching in the small dining room of our brick ranch house, creating a costume or set design for a play. I look back at these scenes through a gauzy scrim woven of the competing threads of her remoteness and my longing.
I had always known Ken was something called a “stepfather,” and had accepted this idea in the same way I accepted that my sister grew in my mother’s belly or that we would never own a dog. In the world of a young child, these realities all lived under the heading of things that just “were,” so I didn’t think to question them, didn’t know to call Ken anything but “Daddy.” And he was my Daddy, in spite of making his entrance into my life well into its first act.
Even in my later elementary years, a sweet narcissistic fantasy attended my journey to and from school. Each day, during this fifteen minutes of liminal space, I hop-walked over the cracks in the rough sidewalk and imagined I was not just a regular girl who took tumbling classes and played the violin, but a very important princess being raised in a “normal” family until it was time for me to take my throne. In my complex narrative, it was too dangerous for me to live in my castle, and bodyguards from my kingdom watched me walk to and from school, protecting me from a variety of bad actors who aimed to keep me from my destiny.
Her name is the first one in a list of others who are also somehow connected to this essential part of me, my genetic code. Our DNA connection is the strongest, Ancestry tells me; she is “close family.” And she is the only person on the list who is not related to me through my mother. Her last name is familiar to me because it is the last name of the man who impregnated my mother with a part of that genetic code, a man I never knew and, because he has since died, will never know. A man who didn’t know I existed. As I peer into her family tree, I have to stop everything for a moment – moving, breathing, thinking – so that my entire focus can settle on this new piece of information: this is my half-sister.