“I think this has nothing to do with you and God or you and me. This is about you and your dad and the fact that you think he doesn’t want you and never has.”
She didn’t mean her words to be unkind, just honest, as she and I had always been with each other. But they struck in a place so deep that I was shocked to find my eyes instantly rimmed with tears. I blinked them away, trying to decide whether to walk out of there right then or just stay and pretend she hadn’t said that to me. To my dismay, however, she persisted, trying to be supportive but delivering a message that couldn’t have been crueler.
“I think you still feel as rejected by him as you did the day you first came here,” she said in an even softer whisper. “In a way, you’re still that same six-year-old little boy who, more than anything, just wants his father to want him.”
FOUR
When I look back now, it is no wonder that the part of me that held my earliest memories didn’t know what to make of the first year I came to live in Lancaster County. My entire universe shifted when I was six years old.
First, my mother died of a medical condition that meant nothing to me. It wasn’t as though she got sick or was hit by a car or fell off a high cliff. The word “aneurysm” had no context in my young world. She was simply alive one moment and gone the next.
Second, my father, who already had orders for a year-long remote assignment to Turkey, hadn’t sought a hardship reassignment after she died—though he could have. Military members could always ask to be reassigned if a death in the family or a terminal illness or some other serious circumstance meant the member needed to be somewhere other than where he or she was scheduled to go. Instead, Dad asked my grieving grandparents to take me to Pennsylvania to live with them while he was gone and simply kept his orders as they were.
Thus, in the span of just a few days, I essentially lost both my parents and was thrust into an Amish life, where I had to learn a new language, a new way of living, a new way of thinking. It was like going through a doorway to another world where everything I knew and loved was gone and I had no choice but to start over.
At least my grandparents were kind, and they had a son my age, who didn’t seem to mind at all that he would now have to share everything he had, including his bedroom, with the nephew he’d never even met before. For that matter, he hadn’t met my mother, either—his own sister—because she’d left home before he was born.
Once I was settled, I’d made do the best I could, secretly marking off the days till my father’s return on a calendar I kept hidden under my mattress, a free one that had come in the mail from a tractor company and my grandmother had thrown away.
When my dad’s year in Turkey was up, he came back to see me, bringing along presents for everyone from overseas as well as some of my favorite toys from home and the cigar box containing my most treasured possessions that I’d always kept tucked away under my bed. I had already outgrown most of the toys by then, but I had been thrilled to get back the cigar box, which I’d missed at first but nearly forgotten about by then.
I’d been so happy to see him, and to have him there—until it was time to go and I learned to my astonishment that he wasn’t taking me with him. Again. He told me he had accepted a follow-on assignment in Spain and would need me to stay right where I was until that was over too. I’d been devastated and spent many an hour once he was gone wondering what I’d done wrong to send him away.
Looking back now, of course, I realized that my father probably just couldn’t handle being a single parent of a seven-year-old boy, especially while living overseas and being in the military. I tried to be patient, but it was while he was in Spain that he met an army nurse named Liz Brinkman. By the end of that tour, he married her and then they moved to Japan. I didn’t even meet Liz—or see my dad again, for that matter—until a year after that, when she was pregnant with their son, Brady. That time, it was a quick visit, as they had only brief leave to come back to the States for her own mother’s funeral.
After that they returned to Japan, and I didn’t see my dad again for two more years.
All in all, I was eleven years old before my father was reassigned stateside, Liz got out of the military, and they came to Lancaster County to get me at last. Finally, he sat me down and asked me if I wanted to come live with him and his wife and their toddler in California.
It was the moment for which I’d been waiting for five years, yet all I could think about in that moment was that he was asking me. Not telling me. Asking me.
My father didn’t say, “I want you to come, Tyler.” He said, “Do you want to come?”