I’ve Never Felt As Ashamed As I Did When I Was Applying for a Passport
I didn’t know my biological father, and that sucked.
I can’t remember what the woman behind the desk looked like. I have no recollection of her skin color, if she wore glasses, how tall she was or what she was wearing.
I can only remember the way she made me feel.
It was the summer of 1990, and I was handing her my passport application at the post office. I had plans to study in England the following year.
Her gruffness wasn’t unexpected. Most government employees weren’t sweet or pleasant. She was all business and no-nonsense. No smiles. No “how are you?’s”.
Her eyes quickly scanned my application and birth certificate.
I had left the “birth father” section blank. I only knew his name.
“What’s your father’s date of birth?”
I don’t know.
“What’s his place of birth?”
I don’t know.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I’m not sure how I responded. I’m sure my voice was quiet, stuck in my throat. I’m sure her authoritative voice spoke volumes over my uncertainty. I didn’t have answers to give her.
“We need it. We need to know.”
As if I was willingly withholding this information. As if I forgot.
As if I could call someone easily and get this information for her.
My mother told me my biological father’s name. She also told me he had a family with children. Five of them. Yikes. After that, his birth details were irrelevant.
Eventually, the woman behind the desk reluctantly bought my token line, “my mother never married my biological father”. I wondered if I’d be granted a passport. I wondered if I’d be able to study abroad. I wondered if I was going to be punished for something I had no control over.
When I was inside the safety of my car, I cried with hysteria. The shame was so big and overwhelming my whole body shook. I felt damaged. Damaged beyond repair.
In her quest to make sure my application was complete, the woman behind the desk highlighted a very dark part of me that I was hoping to always keep buried. I don’t know anything about my biological father because I had never met him or spoken to him.
I could have lied. I could have given her any birth date and any birth place.
I could have told her to fuck off. I could have said, “I’ve never met him, is that going to be a problem?” I could have stood up and spoken clearly and loudly. I could have owned my fatherlessness.
But, wisdom and clarity only come from healing. And I was living in a blanket of shame. Shame that I hadn’t yet explored or even knew what to call.
This confrontation was just another reminder of the truth I had been living with since the day I was born. I was separate. I didn’t fully belong. I was on the outside of the rest of the world.
Everyone else that filled out a passport application had this information, but I didn’t.
When I considered this even more deeply and asked myself the question, why didn’t I belong? I had to come up with an answer.
I just knew I wasn’t like my friends who had two parents with the same last name. I wasn’t even like Marcia, Jan, and Cindy Brady who lived happily with a stepfather that treated them with love and respect.
My last name was not the same as my mother’s, brother’s or stepfather’s. I was practiced at explaining to those curious enough to ask why and had a ready-made response that I could pull out at any time. But the curious were never persistent. The curious knew to stop asking more questions. My response elicited a simple, “Oh.” “Okay.” On the surface, acceptance. Approval.
My different last name was enough for the outside world to know I was separate.
I had my mother’s maiden name. Because I didn’t know my biological father, a man that was living his own life with a family that didn’t know I existed, I knew I was on the outside.
Up until I applied for my first passport, I naively hoped that it didn’t matter that I didn’t know my biological father. I had lived the first 19 years of my life not knowing him. But I quickly understood that this was necessary information. Someone knew; yet no one I knew did.
After a few long weeks, my passport arrived in the mail. The pain and shame that surfaced while I was in the post office, eventually settled to the bottom of my being. Where it had been before I stepped through those doors.
In my mid-20’s, I wrote my biological father a letter.
One Saturday afternoon, he called me. We talked. Father to daughter. He didn’t have to call me. But he did. I can still remember how I felt when I hung up the phone. A void had been filled. I felt filled and light. I never asked him where he was born or when his birthday was. I didn’t need to.
