I was so busy trying to make ends meet, raising my baby boy & still trying to figure out who I was. I was living in Yukon in a little rat trap rental house with my cousin and her daughter as me and Austin’s roommates. We had each other’s backs, both understanding each other’s plights. We were both dating, neither exclusively at the time. Michael and Lee were in and out of our lives. The off-and-on was confusing for me, so I can only imagine the effects it had on Austin. When I decided to finally go through with starting this blog, one of the most daunting things about that for me was having to sit down with my kids and tell them what they could expect. I can’t describe the turmoil in my mind about not only sharing these most private and painful details with the world but also with my children. The ones God gave me to shape and teach were about to get a front-row seat to every bad decision I’ve ever made. Thankfully, they’ve at least learned a little something about grace along the way, and have extended it to me with not only support but real enthusiasm.
This was a particularly difficult period, I was working two jobs trying to make ends meet without any child support. When my cousin and I moved in together, Lee and I had been in an “off” period for a little while. We always knew what the other was up to though, because we shared a friend group. Even though the struggle was real in that little house in Yukon, we had some great memories there too. My cousin and one of my close friends, (who was also like a brother to Lee), and tight with my brother as well, ended up dating and eventually married ( I was the Maid of Honor!) a few years later. He moved in with us when we moved our menagerie into our grandparents’ house in Yukon. Those two were so perfect for each other and always so great to laugh with, cry with, and support us no matter how stupid the choices we made were. So it was no surprise to them when Lee and I reconnected yet again after a drunken phone call in the middle of the night. He had been in a significantly bad car crash and needed me to pick him up from the hospital. It wasn’t right away, but we always found our way back together through friendship first. I guess when you grow up with someone as close as we did, that bond becomes a comfort in a codependent unhealthy way if you don’t know any better, and obviously we could never see it, because it’s all we’d really known. But I’m jumping ahead of myself here….
There was a particular gloomy fall day when I got in a bind and needed a babysitter for Austin because I had to work. Prior to this my mom and stepdad had talked me into finally going through with a paternity test with Michael. The three of us rode together and went to a clinic and had our cheeks swabbed. At the clinic, the man who took our samples was actually someone that Michael knew through his on/off girlfriend and was a close family friend of her family. They chatted throughout the process and it went fairly quickly and smoothly. I feel like now is a good time to mention that The Jerry Springer Show had become really popular with “explosive paternity results” like every episode. Anyway, it had been a few days, maybe a week after the test, when I called Michael to see if he could watch Austin. I hadn’t considered those test results, in my mind they were just a formality, and I hadn’t received anything in the mail stating otherwise. So I called him up and began to plead my case; he let me finish completely before he said, “he’s not mine.” Have you ever heard something that hit you so unexpectedly, so profoundly, that it literally left a weird taste in your mouth? Like something metallic on my tongue…. I sat there stunned for a moment until I could stutter out “WHAT?” He said that he’d gotten the test results and it said that he wasn’t the father. I couldn’t believe the words he was saying, but he was saying them so gently, and with such compassion I had to believe him. I screamed and cried while HE talked ME down. Looking back on the way he handled that whole situation, leaves me in awe. He should’ve been the one freaking out, but he wasn’t, he was worried about me. We talked until there was really nothing left to say, I apologized over and over and he assured me that he would be okay. I couldn’t stop thinking long after about his poor family and the hell that they had gone through as well. I called my mom as soon as I could breathe and told her everything. We hashed and rehashed the situation to death. “Are you sure there was no one else?” she asked, and I reminded her that there had only been Lee and I’d had a period after that “one time”. So logically, after much deliberation, we decided the test must’ve been rigged by the man who took the DNA samples, because what other explanation was there?! Obviously in complete denial, and at a loss for a reasonable explanation, I held onto that theory for way too long and wasted even more time for Michael, the REAL father, myself, and most of all Austin. I tested that theory on Michael one night when we had run into each other at a New Year’s Eve party at some mutual friends’ house. I drank entirely too much, got all in my feels, and drove home to the house Austin and I shared with yet again, Lee and his younger brother. The two of them were working on the road and I came home to realize that I’d locked myself out. I drove to a payphone and called Michael (who else?!) to come and save me. Of course, he graciously obliged and helped me break in when he got there. Once inside, we finally got to have the long overdue conversation about all that had happened. We cried and cried for the pain and sorrow that we had endured, he told me that it killed him that Austin was calling another man “Daddy” (Lee had always been the only “Daddy” Austin had known), he also told me he thought Austin looked like Lee. I laughed at that, and then again at Carly when she told me the same thing later. I had never even considered that to be a possibility until……..
Proverbs 1:7
Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
