My birth father once told me that nothing would ever go right for me until I honoured him as my parent. In his mind, I think, honouring him means deferring to him in every situation, furthering his agendas at the expense of my own, considering his preferences above other people's including my own, taking his religion (Islam), and making my relationship with him more of a priority than my relationship with anyone else. This would hardly be reasonable even if he had been an active part of my life, not the absent ne'er-do-well that he actually was.

I have moments, however, when I wonder if I'm not the unreasonable one. Should I have kept trying with him? I ask myself if I could I have bent on any of my terms if it meant keeping him in my life? But I had reduced my terms to the most basic level, and beyond that there simply was no room for negotiation. What did I want from him? The time and freedom to develop an authentic relationship with him so that our efforts at relating did not seem hollow to me. Upon his release from prison about two years ago, he wanted to jump feet first into my life, not caring that he would be disrupting a lifetime of cultivated, nurtured relationships that prexisted my very tentative one with him.

I told him in the course of a phone conversation that I wanted to wait to visit with him until an especially busy season of parties and events was over so I wouldn't be distracted; I also told him I needed more time to prepare to see him. I think he told me to "take care" and hung up the phone. He called back a few minutes later, but I did not take the call. We've had only one supremely perfunctory conversation since then.

My stepfather and mother are separating. After a habit of sporadic physical abuse that ultimately culminated in his beating up my youngest sister, my mother finally got the courage to divide the joint and marrow of their life together. I decided that I had no father at all the night in late september that my sister called me up crying telling me she'd been punched, kicked, and head butted by this man.

I once wrote him a detailed letter telling him how much his abuse of my mother had wounded me, handicapped me, shaped me as a somewhat emotionally awkward woman. He apologized, asked me to forgive him, and told me I never had to worry about him hurting my mother again. He was about to go into surgery for some illness of his, and sounded legitimately repentant. Maybe he was sorry.

His illness had weakened him, but if I am to be completely honest, I never believed that he wouldn't still hit my mother if he weren't so physically compromised. His attitude, bullying tactics, and volatile reactions to the dumbest things, were all indicators that his "old man" was still ruling him.

When he did act out again, I guess I was relieved, because I was sick of waiting for that shoe to drop, and I also knew that I was going to be free of the charade of having to include him in the schema of people to take into account. I haven't been able to have a conversation with him since I was a teenager, the last time I saw him punch my mother so hard, it deadened her nerves on the left side of her face.

I have the paradoxical freedom of all orphans. No restrictions and familial definition to hem me in; I can cut my own path without a model after which I will be expected to pattern myself. No strength to draw, no resources for me or the children I want to shepherd someday, no safety net.