Bill Clinton Ruined my Life
Bad Dad Stories
I had a rocky early teenage hood. Depression hit me like an anvil at 13. Experimenting with drugs and self-injury did not make it better. Luckily my mother quickly saw what was up and got me help. With therapy, and drugs provided and prescribed by Dr. Perfect I got a lot better by the time I was 17.
Life was good, I had a job, had some friends, and was busy being the designated driver for my friends who were just discovering the wonders of booze and drugs. I even started to feel better in my body and had a tiny bit of confidence.
But Bill Clinton had to ruin it for me. By legislating sweeping welfare reform that required that deadbeat dads be located and made to pay child support. I’d met my father once and he’d never paid child support.
My only relationship with my dad was one of fantasy. I spent an entire five-hour flight at six years old, sure that the tall man sitting next to me was him. I often imagined the reasons that he was MIA. He always had really good, understandable, solid reasons for being gone and would make up for it with big grand reunions where he would spend the rest of his life making up for being gone. With age, I matured out of these fantasies and stopped looking for his face in any man that resembled him.
My mature self assumed he would deny paternity. He had already denied the paternity of my younger half-brother, by another mother, and fled the country for years to avoid paying child support.
Uncharacteristically, my dad agreed that he was my dad. He even called our house and left an apologetic message. Hearing the message was like hearing a message from, my imaginary best friend from childhood.
When I reached him on the phone, he clearly already had planned for our reunification, “I am sorry about this. I would like to come to visit you. I think I could afford a ticket. Do you think I could stay with you guys? Do you know if your mom has a bike I could borrow? I would be okay with sleeping on the floor if you don’t have a guest room.”
“Um. You should talk to my mom about that.”
“Okay. I will talk to her,” he said and then paused forever. “Well kid, I can’t really afford long-distance calls. Would you write to me? Can I write to you?”
I wanted to remind him that we had called him, but I said, “sure.”
We wrote back and forth for a month. I told him about myself. I told him it had been hard not having a dad. I told him about how his ex-wife beat me with a hairbrush when I was visiting them at four years old. I told him that I had struggled with depression and drugs but was doing better.
He wrote to me, typing letters on old crumpled computer paper. He never responded to anything I shared about myself but did tell me about him. He lived by himself. He grew his own food. He had to quit a higher-paying job last year because “they” were after him. He sent a picture of himself apologizing for the quality, it was a work ID picture. He was odd but I started to feel like maybe I could have a dad.
With his few letters, I found some fantasy again. They were less dramatic than those of my six-year-old self. A visit could be good. We could connect and form an adult father-daughter relationship. I might be able to have two parents that could help pay for college. Maybe, someday he could walk me down an aisle, and give me a way to a man, I might love.
When the issue of child support got settled, he got mean and mad. He crushed any fantasy with his typewriter.
I got a 7-page, single space letter, typed letter. It explained why everything that had happened in my life wasn’t his fault. It was his mother’s fault. It was my fault, I had been a demanding hard to deal with four-year-old. My mother was not a good mother and had molly-coddle me too much. On top of everything, I was too young to understand how hard the world was. I also needed to grow up and be an adult and take responsibility for my own problems, and stop blaming him.
My mother received a letter at the same time, which also included copies of every letter I sent him. I was being manipulative by not sharing my letters to him with my mother.
I gave my mother his letters and asked her to hold on to them and put them away.
I declared that everything would be fine. I was fine before him, and I could be fine after him. My will was strong, and I would will my away around this. I wasn’t going to let my crazy dad or Bill Clinton ruin my life.
I believed myself until I had to look at myself in the mirror, in a room full of mirrors. One part of my job at a physical therapy clinic was to clean the room full of mirrors. Normally it didn’t bother me. After my dad, something cracked in me. Any trace of confidence was gone. Looking in the mirror, I felt fat. I was fat. I felt ugly. I was ugly. I was fatherless again, in fantasy and in real life.
