Ever just wake up with someone on your mind?

I'm kind of tripping out here...lots of old feelings coming to the surface. I've determined that my mind operates on a purely random basis. Out of the blue this morning, I'm in the shower and a thought pops into my mind : My bio father's son will graduate highschool this year. There was no warning, no notable trigger for this thought, it just popped in.

Now, remember I told ya'll that my parents had me when they were both 16? Remember I didn't know my father growing up? Well, I did actually meet him at age 14. My mother was going thru a messy divorce/bankruptcy with step-daddy #1 and was in need of cash. So, she applied for public assistance.

Social services said, "Whoa, wait, there's a baby daddy who shoulda been paying you for a lotta years," some of those years in which she'd used the state monies before - and it was determined that bio dad would need to pay back child support to bring my mother back into good standing for current assistance.

He had lived in the same small town as us most of those 14 years. He was surprised, and who wouldn't be? Ring-ring... hey remember that person who came into the world 14 yrs ago whom you share DNA with? Well, now that she's almost raised, I need some help.

He was cool with it, but wanted to meet me. I of course had longed for such a meeting with fear, vacillating from angst to idealization of him (I had this fantasy that my father would be a white knight sweeping me away from my mother for awhile) and more for about 10 years. Now that it was here, I had all sorts of insecurities arise. He's going to see my dreadful teeth and freak, hope he likes chubby-faces, I'm too old for him to love....

But meet we did, at my paternal aunt's house (yeah, I knew who he was-my cousins on his side accounted for about 50% of my schoolmates). He was married with two sons, aged 5 and 2. That was September 26, 1993. We spent time together on the weekends after that. For the first time in my life, I witnessed stability in a family; I was enamored!

In November, Mom announced that we would be moving from WA to CO with her then live-in boyfriend, later becoming abusive, alcoholic step-daddy #2. I was crushed. Not only would I be leaving the life-long home and friends I'd known, but this new chapter in my life was to continue long-distance.

We moved to a VERY small town in CO that I hated with as much teenage dispair and misery that I could muster. Not only had I been removed from the life I'd always known, the father I'd only just gotten to know, but now I was in a cow-poke town full of machismo, ignorance, and plain non-acceptance of new people - and I was going to graduate here...yippee. Oh, and step-daddy #2? He just got more OCD and more abusive as time went on. I have nothing but the fondest memories of Craig, CO.....right.

Meanwhile bio father and I wrote to each other. We talked on the phone frequently, which caused my mother's green-demon of envy to come out in full force. She hated him for his past sins of abandonment, and continued to punish both of us for it. I turned 15, and then it was summer. I got to go back and visit him, and all of my friends I missed so badly!

That summer was totally idyllic....until reality came crashing in late one night. Seems bio father still had some unresolved feelings toward Mom too, and I, looking like her and being in close proximity, was the target for those feelings. The wife had gone to bed. It was just us. As we sat watching a movie, dear old dad's hands began to wander. I got a crash-course in the literal meaning of being "frozen with fear." I couldn't move, talk, all I could do was sit there and cry. I tried to talk a hundred times, with the words screaming in my mind, but my mouth simply would not move. Finally, as he went for skin on skin contact, up the back of my shirt, my neurons fired up and did what my brain had been begging to do from the beginning - bolted right out of there and locked myself in the bathroom.

Honestly, the whole thing is still grey to me. It was clearly a boundaries violation, but in the scheme of sexual abuse, damn... it could have been so much worse, right?

Nevertheless, there was a mass of confused emotions shooting through my mind for the next 48 hours. Denial coursed through my veins in a violent, flash-flood like torrent. So much so, I was clouded for a while and still made the call to my mom saying I didn't want to come back - a call I'd thought of since I first arrived. Mom was pissed, of course, and had my maternal grandmother pick me up and ship me home.

It took me a long time to process it fully. For awhile we still corresponded, but by the time I'd graduated, we were down to b'day and Christmas acknowledgements only. I sent him a wedding announcement in college, and I think that was it. I briefly connected via e-mail with him after the birth of my daughter, to let him know he was a grandparent. They sent a few items for her in the mail....but now, well it's been a minimum of 4 years since we've talked, and just as long since I've even thought of him and his family...it just became easier for me to mentally detach myself from him b/c of all the conflicting emotions that thinking of him brings up.

So, now, almost 13 years after meeting, and probably only 1 full year of meaningful interaction, why this thought? What triggered it? I don't know, but I do know that I'm all messed up for today. sigh