My donor father didn’t want anything to do with me. He is a principled man, strict as strict could be, well loved and respected. And yet here I was, a living, breathing evidence and constant reminder of his infidelity, failure and weakness. So he preferred I stayed out of sight. He sent money for me to be taken care of, paid tuition for private schools, and sent me and my mother to holidays abroad. But I was never welcome in his home and neither did he make any effort to see me.

When I was about five or six years old, my mother would point him out to me on television, “See that man, he’s your father.”

When I told my school mates he was my father, they laughed at me and said I was being absurd, I was making up stories. And I admit it really didn’t make any sense, because I had my grandfather’s surname and no relationship with my father. I had no photos to share, nothing except my mother’s word.

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When I was ten years old, my father’s absence became quite stark to me. I saw other boys and their fathers taking walks to and from school, playing football, doing school projects and many more together. But I had no such father figure in my life. When I got bullied on the playground, I had no father with whom to threaten my bullies. When it was time for Daddy’s Day at school, my uncle took me. That is until my stepfather walked in and completely filled the position of a father.

The first time my mother introduced me to David, I thought he was white. He is biracial, born to a white man and a black woman. He has blond hair and green eyes, and a polished air about him, like a person who grew up attending posh schools like the ones I go to, and lived in a big mansion. In actual fact, he was raised on a farm, and when he was not in school, he was helping on the farm. He had a somewhat rough life, and yet David is a gentle soul and a gentleman at heart. And to that man, I write a love letter today.

From the moment he walked into our lives, things changed for both me and my mother. He brought the aura of a man in charge with him. David is a brilliant man, an electrical engineer and farmer. I saw from the onset how he respected my mother and treated her with tenderness. And because he loved my mother, he loved me too. He respected me and taught me respect by giving it to me first.

Before he asked for my mother’s hand in marriage, he took me on a fishing trip and talked to me about it first. He told me we were about to be a family, so he could properly adopt me, and give me his name. And he asked my opinion, and I said, “I will be very happy to have a father.”

David and my mother were married on a Friday in an intimate wedding where I served as his best man. The following Monday, he adopted me, with my donor father’s blessing, and he gave me his last name. My donor father essentially said, “Take him.”

And take me, David did, and love me he did!

David raised me as his own. As a child, he was kind and patient with me, and as a young adult, he is respectful of me. He is the one who has always pushed me, and encouraged me to make the best of every opportunity life has presented me. And he had the grace to still make room for my donor father, he never sought to replace him, he was the first to always remind me I had a father who might one day want a relationship with me.

David’s love and compassion for me taught me how to write a love letter like this one. Most essentially, he taught me to write my love letter with the way I lived my life.

While in high school, I made friends with the wrong crop of boys and began to go wayward. I fancied myself a hard guy, smoking pot, chasing girls and bullying my classmates. I guess it was at that time that all the resentment I felt toward my donor father surfaced, and I began to self-destruct. By that time my mother and David had had two sets of twin daughters; I had four sisters. 

 My mother and David talked to me, all to no avail. Then one Friday David took me on a little trip. We went to his childhood neighborhood and met some of his contemporaries, his older brother included. Those guys clearly were not doing much with their lives. They rejoiced to see David because he was the cash cow. They hounded my father for money and told him all kinds of stories of woe to get him to pull out his wallet.  And they swooned all afternoon over David’s Mercedes Benz. We eventually had some alone time with Sam, David’s older brother. And Sam lamented about everything in his life, his wife, children, his bus driving job, his health, on and on. He needed money, so David dashed him a lot of it.

On our way home, David turned to me and said, “If you do not make good choices, you will be Sam oneday. Except you’ll not be begging from your younger brother, but rather your sisters and their husbands, your brothers-in-law. Don’t sell your birthright. Change course. Sam and I had the exact same opportunities, I took mine seriously, he didn’t.”

It dawned on me that the whole trip had been to show me the lesson of where bad choices would lead me. I changed course.

David’s love for me has always been patient and kind!

When I experienced my first heartbreak, David was on hand to give me some manly advice. He said, “The real flex is keeping your heart soft and your boundaries strong. Don’t let anybody’s bad attitude poison your aura, neither you take disrespect from anyone for any reason.”

After high school, my donor father offered me an opportunity to attend an Ivy League school in Britain. By that time, I had written that man off in every way possible. And so my pride took center stage, “I do not want shit from that man,” I told my mother.

David took me on another man to man trip and said, “I should be the one whose ego is bruised, not you. But I know I cannot afford an Ivy league education, so why let my ego block your opportunity. Take your father’s offer and make the best of it.”

I am an Ivy League educated robotics engineer. The father who donated his sperm paid my way through expensive schools. And the father who gave me his heart raised me to be a man, he taught me how to be a man. And to that man who shared his heart with me, my best friend, I write this love letter.

A  love letter to my father.. A love letter to David, to the man who loved my mother, and me by extension. To him and to all the fathers who step in and heal little broken hearts they did not break, this is a love letter, to thank you, to acknowledge you, to bless you.

A love letter to every father who did not make a child but loves that child nonetheless. May you be blessed.

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