Who’s Your Daddy?

Sometimes I wish I had the guts to ask for what I need. It takes a lot of courage to do that though. It takes even more to express yourself to someone with whom you desire a relationship. For a long time I’ve wanted desperately to have a relationship with my former step-dad. If nothing more than a simple exchanging of stories about our lives together; I finally find him, after years of desire for it, and we seem to be at a stalemate. I’ve sent him several messages on Facebook, in an attempt to spark conversation. He seemed, when I talked to him on the phone to want to talk to me, to know me, to be a part of my life. He seemed interested. Now though I can’t seem to get a response. Today he posted on an old picture of me, my mom, and my Papa, yet hasn’t answered my messages. I know he knows how, and I know he at least has been semi willing to do so in the recent past. Maybe I’m to blame; perhaps I’m behaving like men say women do. Hint dropping, mind reading, expecting my desire for a relationship to be obvious, when in fact he’s just as scared and just as unsure about how to proceed. How do we proceed? The last time I think we saw each other I was probably 6, which was a good 21 years ago. Obviously I’m a woman, I’m married, I watched his ex-wife run her life into the ground, I’ve seen both my Grandparents, the people who raised me pass away as well. I have a relationship with my biological father, though sometimes it is a struggle. I need to be empathetic to his feelings, the confusion, joy, sadness, and anything else he could feel, but how? How can I attempt to be that for him, when I’m so lost as well? What if I’m giving him feelings he really doesn’t have? What if he honestly doesn’t give a flying poo if I am alive and well? What if he just doesn’t know how to tell me? Part of me says, Meg just jump of this bridge, at worst he wants nothing of you. I just don’t know how! I don’t know how to be okay with the possibility of losing the one person alive that can tell me about my life as a child. Where do I go from here?