by Kara Sundlun
Everyone was so busy celebrating, I had to go by myself to the bathroom to clean myself up, and I couldn’t help but feel forgotten. It was a feeling I would become more familiar with as Mom tried to balance her life as a mom and new wife. They left on their honeymoon to Mexico, and I wondered if I would still be the most important thing in her life.
After the wedding, Mom was determined to create the picket fence life in our nice colonial home in Upper Arlington, a bucolic suburb of Columbus. She didn’t have to work, so she stayed home, honing her interior design skills by decorating our house in seafoam green and peach, which was all the rage in the 70s. I didn’t want to call John “Dad,” but Mom said I had to since he had adopted me. To this day, I can’t get his name off my birth certificate because of some whack adoption laws that make everything permanent, when it shouldn’t be.
A couple years later we moved to a nice four bedroom home in Troy, Michigan. Mom decided that staying at home just wasn’t for her, so she went back to work. I secretly wished she could be happy making me cookies, like my friends’ moms.
In the meantime, John tried to do all the right things like coaching my soccer team and cutting down Christmas trees, but he was an alcoholic, and more often than not he embarrassed me. I didn’t want him to be part of my life. Sometimes he would go on a drinking binge and vanish for a few days. I hated the smell of his breath when he came home to say he was sorry and try to read me a bedtime story. He didn’t act at all like my friends’ fathers, and there were so many times I wished he would stay gone. I was only about seven at the time, but I remember always making sure he got the mismatched silverware and the chipped plate when I set the table. Why couldn’t he just disappear?
We may have tried to look like the perfect family with all the right window dressings, but behind the curtains Mom and John fought a lot. One time, it happened in front of my good friend, Jennifer. We were in the third grade and playing in the family room when I heard the screaming start. It got so bad, Mom threw a jar of molasses at him, and the thick dark goo splattered all over the floor. We were playing in the other room when we heard the screams and sounds of shattering glass. It scared Jennifer to tears and she begged to go home. I was sure nothing like that happened in her perfect Mormon home. The searing shame burned inside me and made me want to throw things back at them. I didn’t because I didn’t want to look any worse than we already did. More than anything, I desperately wanted to look “normal,” and this was anything but a Leave It to Beaver moment. Mom tried to convince Jennifer they were just acting out a play so she wouldn’t want to call her mom. It didn’t work, and from then on I always played at her house.
But the worst humiliation was when John hit the school bus while driving drunk. I was nine years old and thought I would die of embarrassment if anyone found out. I couldn’t hide and, for some unearthly reason, Mom brought me to court to witness the judge ordering him to stay in jail for the night. I was so ashamed and wished they would keep him locked up. I would rather not have a dad at all than have one whose name ended up in the police blotter.
Mom tried to help him through rehab, and signed herself up for Al-Anon meetings so she could learn not be so co-dependent and heal her “adult-child.” She forced me go to Alateen, even though I wasn’t even ten years old yet, just to make sure I could “recover,” too. Mom always worried about how things I’d witnessed would impact me later in life, and insisted I get preemptive help. I hated having to talk about my feelings to strangers, and just wanted it all to be over.
When they finally got a legal separation, I was thrilled. Life with John had been filled with unpredictable tension and arguments, and more than anything I wanted a normal family life. It was a word I thought about a lot as a child.
When I was in the fifth grade, they finally got divorced and after about a year, John Hewes vanished and quit paying the court-ordered child support. Though we had been abandoned for the second time, I told myself we were better off without him. But I knew Mom was terribly upset he wasn’t fulfilling his obligation to support us.
It seems my dislike for John wasn’t misplaced, since he was also the reason I never saw a photograph of my real father. Mom had saved pictures and newspaper clippings from his various accomplishments to give me once I got older and asked about my biological father. John got drunk one night and burned everything in the box, saying I didn’t need to know any of that, since he had adopted me and was my only father now. Mom said John was jealous that my real father was so successful and thought he was a “dirty Jew.”
With John gone, my mom was wearing even more hats, and it seemed she was coming unglued. She was constantly busy trying to grow her interior design business, heal her wounds with therapy, and raise me alone. It was too much for her to handle by herself. I thought having John gone meant I’d have more time with her, but she was busy trying to support us, so I saw a lot less of her. I was too young to understand the stress she was going through. All I knew was that I missed cuddling up for movie nights and having her there after I came home from school.
My ten-year-old self started to crack under the stress. I was lonely and always angry. Between my issues and Mom’s pressure of supporting us, raising me alone, and going through a divorce, we began fighting a lot. I’d be furious if she was late to pick me up and criticize her for not doing things like all the stay-at-home moms. I was unfair to her, yet I blamed her for anything that was wrong in my life. I know now the chronic ache of abandonment I felt was partly the fault of a biological father who wouldn’t claim me as his own—but back then, I looked to Mom to make it all work.
Adding to my stress was that I was being bullied at school. She was the blonde, popular fifth grader who could make or break my day. If she liked me, I was golden. If she decided I was ugly or dumb, or simply not good enough to play with her, she and the other girls would hit me with jump ropes. I would do anything to make her like me, and even invited her on a getaway with Mom. Looking back, I can barely believe that I took my bully on vacation with me!—but between not having a father, the divorce, a distracted mother, and the bullying, my self worth was disappearing. My already weak foundation crumbed, and coping meant doing anything to make someone approve of me because I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to everything that was happening in my young world. My rage was always right under my skin, until it finally boiled over like a tea pot on a roaring flame.
One day, after a typical fight with Mom, I finally blew. I ran upstairs to the bathroom and took my mother’s pills she used to manage depression. I found the amber colored prescription bottle in her medicine cabinet and took it to my bathroom. The bottle looked about half full, and I wasn’t sure how many it would take to have an effect, so I decided to pop thirteen. I didn’t really want to die, but I was dying for attention. I swallowed them one by one, quickly gulping water from the sink to wash them down. When I was done, I angrily stomped downstairs and announced, “I took your pills.”
“You did what?” she screamed.
“Yep, thirteen of them. Now you won’t have to worry about being there for me.”
It was an incredibly cruel thing to say, especially to a woman whose heart had already been broken so many times.
The truth was I was hurting and I wanted her to magically fix my broken world. I needed her to really see me, to feel like I mattered, to have my hurts validated, rather than just be pushed to the side because life moved at lightning speed.
It was a desperate cry for help, and it worked. Mom’s face went pasty white as she ditched her work files and frantically called Poison Control, where the operator told her to get me syrup of Ipecac. She threw me in the car and sped to the pharmacy down the street. When we got home, I remember feeling happy to have her doting hands on me as she forced me to swallow the thick, bitter syrup. We sat together on the cold bathroom floor as I started throwing up, but I couldn’t stay awake. The pills had flooded my tiny blood stream, and I was going in and out of unconsciousness.
I
have no memory of Mom racing me to the hospital, or the doctors pumping my stomach. They told her that Poison Control had given her the wrong advice, and that she should have rushed me to the ER. The time at home with the Ipecac could very likely have cost me my life. But despite the doctors’ fears, I managed to pull through and made a full recovery after a week in intensive care. They let me go home as long as I enrolled in counseling.
As a mother today, I can’t even imagine how paralyzing the fear must have been for my mom to know her child tried to kill herself—and almost succeeded—due to bad advice. Moreover, I can’t believe I did that to her.
I did the obligatory ten sessions, but didn’t want to go after that because it didn’t feel normal. I wasn’t in therapy long enough to trace back my father’s rejection as the reason for this deep void dwelling inside of me. I never told anyone that I had a biological father I’d never met because I was ashamed. Everyone has a father, right? So why didn’t I? Why couldn’t I?
After everything that had happened, I couldn’t face returning to school—to the kids, the teachers, my bully—since everyone knew what I’d done. We needed a fresh start.
Mom put the house on the market and we moved to Florida, where she took a temporary design project so we could begin again. Mom decided the best place to go was back to Columbus where most of Mom’s family still lived. This would allow her time to rebuild her business and provide a stable home. The best part was that I could grow up near my cousins.
My Aunt Kathy and Uncle Gary were as American as apple pie, and took me in so I could get settled in school while Mom wrapped up her affairs. I was so excited to live with my cousins, Danielle and Brian, who were near my age and the closest thing I had to siblings. Between Aunt Kathy’s legendary home cooked meals and Uncle Gary’s boat rides on the weekend and love of Ohio State football, I thrived in the warmth of their home, and didn’t mind that it was taking Mom a longer than expected to come get me and find a house. While we waited for Mom to come, Aunt Kathy enrolled me in school for the last few months of fifth grade and took me shopping for school clothes. But Mom never came.
She’d met a new man and was going to be engaged. She was so sorry about the change in plans, but it all happened so fast. Aunt Kathy had opened her heart and home to make a place for me, and truth was that I loved it. Now, I felt like the carpet had been pulled out from underneath my feet.
Mom had no clue. She thought we should be happy for her, but I could tell Aunt Kathy was furious, and so was I. So much for stability. Mom finally came to Ohio and moved me back home to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, to a rental house near her fiancé. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, since he was very wealthy and wanted us to move in with him and his children. In the meantime, Mom said I might as well start sixth grade at my new forever school.
With all the turmoil and moves, I was getting good at adapting, and it was easier to make new friends. For a couple years, life was good. Mom was thrilled that I tested at the 12th grade level, which put me in all accelerated classes, thus bolstering Mom’s vision that I was “destined for greatness.” But things started to go south with Mom’s fiancé, and shortly after I started the eighth grade, we had to move. Again. The only apartment she could find was outside my current school district.
For a while, I just kept going to my regular school, but the administrators found out we had moved and made me leave. After spending the evening crying and fruitlessly begging my mom to let me stay, I started my fourth school in three years. And what was worse, I was starting a month after school had already started, so when I showed up for my first day, the kids were lined up in the hall, waiting to see the “new girl.” I felt overexposed, so I slapped on a big smile as I walked toward the front office.
It was the kind of school where most everyone had been friends since preschool, but two bubbly girls, Dayna and Brooke, saved my pre-teen existence by reaching out to me and welcoming me with open arms into their group. As distraught as I’d been about the move, this was meant to be. To this day, Brooke and Dayna are like sisters to me. I couldn’t have known then how they’d be there for me during the media firestorm that would brew a few short years later with my father. But it’s safe to say that God gave me bookends to hold me up.
Through their warmth and friendship, my fear about not being liked subsided, and I was grateful and excited to be invited to so many things with my new friends. I also loved the stability of Brooke’s and Dayna’s homes. They had happy homes with loving, caring parents. Though Mom tried to give me unwavering love and encouragement, my soul was missing the other half of the recipe. I wasn’t naïve, and could easily see the difference in my friends’ homes. I loved the feeling of their family dinners, and envied the simple things like the greetings they got from their dads after coming home from work—the car pulling in, and the squeal of the children running to see Daddy, climbing on him to clamor for their hugs, stepping on each other’s words to tell him about their day. I sometimes looked away, feeling embarrassed—I didn’t want them to see me standing there and pity me that I didn’t have a dad to hug like them.
I know now there is no substitute for the grounding energy of a father, and without it I was like a dinghy tossing about in the ocean, carried away by each passing current, unsure where life would take me, and yearning for the direction that comes from a Dad Compass.
To hide my insecurity, I wanted to appear confident and happy, and learned to just smile so no one would feel awkward. Anytime I felt insecure, my smile rescued me, thereby masking my feelings.
After seeing my real father on TV, I knew he was someone I could be really proud of, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he could be my hero. Maybe he was wondering where I was, too?
The hole in my heart was what drove me to find him. Not only did I feel like something had always been missing, but my real father was everything I would want to dream up. He was handsome, successful, wealthy, and powerful, and running for Governor, no less.
I thought if I could just meet him, he could say he was sorry and make up for lost time by giving me the rock solid foundation and unwavering stability that I craved. I could lean on him when Mom was troubled, or when bill collectors started calling. He could rescue us, help my mom, and make me feel safe.
3 The Universe Strikes Again
Election Night, 1990
Two years went by without acting on my growing gut feeling that I needed to know my father, but it was getting harder to ignore the whispers of my soul as they grew louder. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to meet him. In a practical sense, I didn’t know how to find him, since this was pre-Google. I had no idea what had happened to him after he lost the election. Plus, this had been such a huge secret for so long, that I didn’t know how to share it with my friends.
The simple explanation to Brooke and Dayna was that my mother was divorced, and I didn’t see my father. I left out the part that I technically had two dads from whom I was estranged, and that I’d never met my biological father. The very term “biological father” seemed like an ailment, a wart that that would make me even more different from my friends. While I waffled, the Universe struck again. On TV.
This time it sent me a clear message just as I happened to be walking by the television on Election Day, November 6, 1990. I was fifteen years old.
“On his third try, Rhode Island businessman and war hero, Bruce Sundlun, beat incumbent Governor Edward DiPrete by a landslide,” said the CNN news anchor.
Like the big eye in the room, the television was, once again, working as a divine messenger. It seemed someone really wanted me to make a connection. All I’d done is set the intention, and the Universe provided. Via CNN, no less.
Wow, did my dad just become the Governor?
Despite what I do today, I was anything but a news junkie as a teenager and generally watched after-school specials, so I wondered if this CNN intervention was a sign, like God knocking on my head again, urging me to look at the TV, and saying “Th
is time do something, would ya!”
I had no excuses. Even though there was no internet back then, it wouldn’t be hard to just call information to get the State House address and phone number.
The idea of contacting my father made me think about how Mom had always said I was “destined for greatness,” in part because of his genes. Was I really was just like him, like Mom always said?
It reminded me of the time she took me to see Top Gun and nudged me every time Tom Cruise did something amazing. “That’s what your dad did. He was a famous fighter pilot.”
Apparently, my love of horses was because of him as well. “You know, your father was a champion foxhunter with Jackie Kennedy,” Mom would say.
I loved to dive off the high dive, and ride roller coasters, and Mom always told me my fearlessness came from my father, since she was terrified of heights. Ever since her crash in a Learjet while working for my father, she could barely go on the Ferris wheel. A flock of seagulls got sucked into the engine, causing the plane to take a nosedive deep into Lake Erie. Mom almost quit her job as a stewardess right then, but something made her keep working for my father. She loves to tell the story about how she swam to shore without getting her hair wet, and still used her wet green stamps at the store. Add the fact that both my parents survived plane crashes as another thing on the list of my life that makes me a bit different, and all the more “meant to be,” as Mom would say.
After my second brush with my father on TV, I couldn’t help but think that meeting him was meant to be. My old self defensive belief that I didn’t need a father was losing traction, and I could no longer ignore my overwhelming desire to meet him. I constantly envied the father-daughter relationships and stability my friends had. I was good at hiding it, but not having a father made me feel defective and less than whole. I wasn’t aware of it then, but the fear of abandonment was so ingrained in me, that I always strived for approval. Like a two-legged stool, I wobbled on the inside trying to compensate for what was missing by trying to be perfect, making the honor roll, excelling in sports, always trying to do better, since just being me never felt good enough.