On The Doorstep
I get it.
You have things that are off limits, right? Certain subjects that you won’t discuss? Well…as is fairly obvious by now…I’m a weirdo. One who never got built that way. For better or worse, my life is anything but Fort Knox. My past is a VERY open book.
(Probably way too open at times)
Where did this strange medical disorder come from? Again, no need for any mystery about it. My parents struggled in big ways to express themselves. And it caused a great deal of pain in their lives. That never made sense. Why wouldn’t they just open up? Why couldn’t they ever really talk?
So, naturally, my brain short-circuited.
I opened all the way up and the faucets never turned off.
At this point, it’s like Niagara Falls up in here.
But everyone has a hidden vault in their heart, right? A place where the most personal stuff gets stored. The difference is that I don’t have a long list of items in mine. Just one deep, dark secret. How do I put this? There’s only one skeleton that I’ve kept locked up in the closet.
So I did what people do.
I threw away the key.
Well, everything in our world seems to be in flux these days. So I’ve decided to free my one secret. And I just admitted that I’m a weirdo…so, for me, this means sharing my skeleton with thousands of strangers on the internet. Whatever. I’m supposed to be an open book. So here it goes…
When I was a college freshman, I fathered a child.
It’s something I never talk about.
Ever.
If someone asks whether I have kids, the answer is always no.
(Followed by some lame joke)
See, I never raised my little girl. In fact, her mother and I never even had a real date. I was a skinny nerd who hadn’t yet grown into his impressive nose…but, on one random Saturday night, a stunning blonde at a party wanted to spend the night with me.
Who was I to say no?
As I recall…walking up the stairs with her was the most exciting moment of my life up to that point. One that was followed by an even better 93 seconds in the bedroom. But that was the only time I saw Stephanie. Sure, I would have loved to have been her boyfriend. Come on, I was the king of awkwardness. I would have been thrilled just to eat pancakes with her the next morning.
Instead, I stumbled out of bed alone with two things…a terrible hangover and a smile on my face. I understood. She was long gone. And almost certainly looked at me as a drunken mistake. Well, obviously. I was Don Juan in my head but probably more like Don Knotts between the sheets.
I went to class…eventually finished out that year of school…graduated…and moved on to adult life.
No human has ever properly articulated just how quickly the years will pass in our lives. Somehow, time actually speeds up with each birthday. It accelerates. Such a crazy thing. Before I knew it, almost 2 decades had flown by. I was a jaded 37-year-old who’d eaten way too many pancakes by himself.
One morning, the doorbell rang and I saw a pretty young woman looking up at me nervously. Maybe a college freshman like I’d been all those years ago. But what the hell was she doing on my porch? The blonde-haired stranger mumbled something that I can’t remember. And then exploded my entire universe by whispering:
“I’m not sure how to say this but I think you’re my dad.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
After picking my brain off the floor, I invited Sophia into the kitchen. I don’t think my eyes blinked for the next hour. She explained that she’d just turned 18 and had moved alone to the city. She said she’d wanted to meet me her entire life. Her mother struggled to open up about difficult topics. Much like my parents. And, clearly, I was one of those topics.
Sophia showed up just wanting to talk. Wanting me to see her. To accept her.
I’ve done a number of things that I’m proud of in my life. But none on that day. What can I say? Humans are a mess. I was confused by the whole damn thing. So I stared at her like a blank fool. She said she’d be in town for a few months and would love to meet up occasionally for coffee or lunch. She was a gentle, soft-spoken person. One who seemed to have a lot of sadness behind her eyes. Maybe I should have asked about that but, as a blank fool, I just nodded a lot. And stared.
She had a beauty mark on her forehead. Basically a tiny little dot. And, for some reason, she was very self-conscious about it. Her bangs seemed to be an attempt to keep it covered. She touched it a lot. And was almost continuously aware of the thing. Probably would have made sense if it were a giant scar or something. But, man, it was so small. I remember finding that behavior so unusual. I have bigger marks and freckles all over the place that I never think about. But she seemed obsessed with hers.
To put it very bluntly, I didn’t acknowledge that she was mine. And, yes, I’d like to be able to say I handled it better. But I had a life. One that was full of responsibilities and endless challenges. I didn’t expect this situation to show up on my doorstep. And I just didn’t have room for it.
(I know how this sounds…but it’s the reality of that moment)
We met for coffee a few times. And I basically just kept nodding and staring. I noticed Sophia didn’t look like me. She didn’t sound like me. And she certainly didn’t act like me. She was just completely…different…than I am. And what I found most confusing was the whole beauty mark thing. For fuck’s sake, it really was just a tiny little dot. Who cares? But the girl wouldn’t stop obsessing about it. I look back now and can’t remember many moments when she didn’t seem noticeably self-conscious about it. Aware of it. About a TINY little dot.
One afternoon, I finally said something.
We were sitting outside a Starbucks drinking coffee. She really was a beautiful young woman. Intelligent, articulate, and very kind-hearted. But she was so damn obsessed about this one little thing. It was driving me nuts. So I suddenly blurted out, “It’s just a tiny little beauty mark. Why are you always so focused on it?”
Almost immediately, she started to cry.
Fuck.
Not just a few tears. Nah, this was the kind of primal sobbing that makes you feel concerned. My entire body tensed up. There was deep pain coming out of her.
For this? A beauty mark?
I started feeling embarrassed and looked around to see if anyone else was watching. But this is a big city. Nobody even blinked. After a few minutes, Sophia stopped crying. She wiped her eyes and started to speak…
The special person sitting in front of me opened up her heart that day.
What I realized over the next few minutes would change my life forever.
From the first day in my kitchen, I’d dismissed her concern about something so insignificant. I knew there was so much more to her than the thing on her face. I KNEW for certain that a little dot was absolutely nothing. But as she started speaking softly through her tears, I finally got it. And I suddenly saw it so clearly…
It was just a tiny beauty mark to ME.
But it wasn’t my mark.
See, we’re all brainwashed from the moment we’re born. Literally. Sure, we pop out as a blank slate. But we start recording on Day 1. And we don’t stop. We each get programmed by our own experiences. And, by the time we’re grown, our heads are locked in concrete.
A beauty mark had never impacted my life, so my eyes could only see a “little dot.”
Sophia allowed me to look beyond my concrete head.
She told me about her very first memory. Of how excited she was to start kindergarten. Picking out her favorite outfit, doing her hair just so, and literally skipping into the classroom with a giant smile on her face. The teasing started within the first hour. And continued to the point that she was terrified to go back. That was the last day Sophia remembered feeling normal. Over the next decade, encounters about her “little dot” became a regular part of life. A “tiny” thing had touched every one of her days. It impacted her relationships, her happiness, and her self-esteem. It’s an ongoing battle that she tries to fight. But when Sophia looks in the mirror, it’s the first thing she sees in the reflection – that she is different.
To her, there is nothing “little” about the birthmark on her face.
For Sophia, simple trips to the market have long been stressful events. People looked at her as “different” for so long that she eventually started seeing herself that way. It became part of her identity. I was so busy KNOWING that she shouldn’t be preoccupied with “one little thing” that I never paid attention to what was happening right in front of me. I just assumed that my world was her world too.
We humans are incredible machines. But we’re built with a big design flaw – we are astoundingly stubborn. And it fucks us up all the time. We struggle to see beyond or own reality. Our world becomes the world. We spend big chunks of our lives resisting and defending. Threats on our programming are attacks on what we know to be true.
Fun fact:
The first year of an actor’s training is often just attempting to quiet your brain from thinking “I would never do that” when reading a scene.
And now an honest question for you:
Would you be the same person if you grew up with very different experiences?
Because the resistance in your head to that concept is my point.
We are programmed to stubbornly defend.
The story about Sophia is made up. I never had a daughter. I never even hooked up with the hot blonde (unfortunately). I know, I know. But with all the noise we’re facing, I really needed to land this in a personal way with you…
All of us need to be seen. Heard. Accepted.
If all we know how to do is throw gas on our fires, there’s just one ending for us. We’re all going to burn. Sometimes things will show up on our doorstep that we didn’t plan for. And we won’t have room left in our lives or in our hearts. We won’t “get” how a person can be so obsessed with what we see as a little dot. We will be completely blinded by the concrete of our own heads.
But what if you’re an exception?
What if you can somehow work around your design flaw?
Maybe you’ll be able to really see an individual who is completely different.
Someone who doesn’t look, sound, or act like you.
And maybe we can all stop being so damn closed off.
Or maybe that’s just another made-up story and we’re destined to burn.
I guess we’ll see.
