Missing.

This weekend it was my father’s birthday. Not the man some of you have met as my father, he’s actually my stepfather, even though he raised me from a young child. No, this time I’m referring to my birthfather, who for want of a better reference, I’ll call DJ. (This is what we called him when we were medium sized. When we were little, we called him Daddy John to differentiate from the Daddy we lived with, though never to his face. As we got older, we shortened it, though we never called him it direct.)

I’ve never been very good at sending cards. Those of you waiting for card exchanges (which I’ve now given up on pretty much) will already be aware of that. I’m even worse at doing it within my own family – it seems pretty pointless to me to send a card once a year when you can’t be bothered doing anything else. So I can’t really remember the last time I sent my father a birthday card. This year, for the first year, I can’t, because I don’t know where he is.

He’s lived, pretty much all my life, in the same house, in the town where I’m now working. Before I started work there I dropped in on him a couple of times, I used to send him emails, and sometimes call him up. Once I started work I walked up a few times at lunchtime and ate there, but he never seemed particularly happy to see me, and he never contacted me himself. So I stopped, feeling a bit awkward about it. The one day just before Christmas I bumped into him and his wife in the postoffice and a week or so later they called up. Turned out they’d sold the house and were moving a couple of weeks later.

I made arrangements to take the children up to see them and discovered that for reasons of his own, it seemed my father hadn’t told his wife I’d been up to see them. So she thought I’d been working in the town and never in touch, which might explain why she was being a bit odd with me.

Anyways, we visited, they sold up and they moved. At the time they visited, they didn’t have a proper address to give me, or a phone number, as all they knew was they’d bought a static caravan on a holiday park. So now I’ve no contact details – they didn’t even had the address of the park to give me.

Is it bad form to mislay a parent? Even one who appears to have wanted to be mislaid? He never seemed interested in his grandchildren – they visited lots when Big was born, but by the time Small was born he came once on his own and that was it. No cards for Christmas or birthdays, no phonecalls, no emails. Should I have continued putting all the effort in one way? It’s annoying to call up and be called names, however affectionately, because you haven’t called in a while, when the person who is doing it has never called you.

Despite the way we’d drifted apart (can you call it that, when we’ve never really been together? I lived there for a while a few years ago, in tough times, but it was weeks not months and was like being a guest, not a family member) I miss the fact he isn’t there. I drive past the end of his road, and it’s weird not being able to just stop, bang on the door and walk in. I think the only reason they told me that they were leaving was they didn’t want me to do that to a stranger! I didn’t know that I would miss him, but I do, and it’s just one more weirdness of what has been a difficult year – this all happened months ago, but today is the first day I’ve felt able to write about it.