Daddy Wars

Since we are back to Daddy wars on this blog, I’ll tell this story again.

My great-grandmother’s second husband raised three generations of children in my family, including me. And he wasn’t even really her husband. They lived together for almost 60 years but great-grandma refused to marry him.

Great-grandma was very severe. She was a fancy career woman, and she never had time for her only daughter. By the time I came around, she reconsidered and was the best great-grandma. But with her daughter Klara, she was hardly ever there.

Klara was raised by the stepdad. He never had any kids of his own, and he easily could have passed Klara off as his daughter. This was almost 100 years ago, and the manliness thing was huge. Raising somebody else’s kid with a woman who wouldn’t even marry you because you weren’t good enough couldn’t have been great for the ego. Great-grandma would have been fine with pretending that Klara wasn’t her first husband’s daughter. She wanted to exclude Klara’s real father from her life completely. Nobody was allowed to mention his name in her presence.

But Klara’s stepdad cared not about his status and what others thought of him. He cared about Klara. For years, he secretly took her to see her real Dad. And then he secretly took Klara’s son to see his real grandpa. Great-grandma, as I said, was severe. She hit him. Even in old age she did it. I saw it many times. Plus, she worked for the KGB and, unlike her husband, was a member of the Communist Party. She was not a woman you wanted to cross. And he still defied her for decades to make sure his stepdaughter had her real Dad in her life.

This was all during Stalinism. Think about what the guy was risking by defying a woman who had her own airplane to take her to top-secret military installations she was building in Siberia. What can possibly motivate a person to take the kid he’s raising to see her real Dad in these circumstances? Many people can’t be assed to do it without Stalin, Siberia and all the rest of it hanging over them.

It’s love. This is what you do when you love a child. You don’t use a child to feed your ego, prop up your relationship status, or prove anything to others.

This is the kind of love with which I was raised. This is the love that feeds me my whole life. A child deserves to be loved like this and not to serve as supporting cast in a parent’s performance of a flattering, self-serving fairy-tale.