Re Posted:
One of the reasons I am so excited about KIT is that in less than two weeks I may actually meet my very first son, but aside from that ...
Is this another son you didn't know about?
Not really - over the years, I have come to know. This situation is not even parallel to the time back when I discovered that I had a son I never knew of. This is a young man (I "suspect" fathered by me) who was raised by my ex-wife; the woman I married when I was barely out of high school. She and I divorced about six months later and spent a great deal of time trying to get back together and "destroying each others lives," somewhat, instead of making a clean break.
After my ex-wife and I divorced, we kept on "trying" to be together. Even after we had both taken on a few more partners as companions (my own roster during that time included a re-unite with my first real girlfriend who was the mother of the other older son you already know about - I am sorry if this all seems complicated, but it is really not complicated at all to me. Things are actually coming together in my life.), we kept on getting back together and breaking up again. It was almost five years after our agreement to dissolve our marriage, before we finally gave up on trying to rekindle the awesome thing we had once shared together. During that time (I was creating my own career in music and I was gone a lot) she had a child. She always and always and always told me he was not my son, but as time went on, I came to know. She still denied it and eventually, once I showed interest in knowing the truth, she would no longer allow me contact with him, since he was still a kid. Things began to turn very ugly between his mother and I well before I met my current, lifelong, forever wife. His mother and I had our last time together when the young man was about twelve or so. I have to be honest about this one point, because it really burns for me to live with such stabbing regrets. He was there at first during that last hook-up between my ex-wife and I, but I did not even look at him. He was just about twelve or so and I did not even look at him. (this one instance of failure - MY OWN failure - is something that will always weigh heavily upon my mind. I could have begun to establish a rapport with the young man on that day, but I was more interested in his mother's "mommy parts" and how I was going to relieve/relive myself all over them)
Now that he is almost thirty five and we have made contact, finally, it seems fairly obvious to both of us that I am much more likely to be his true father than the short, dark man (six inches shorter than I am and nine inches shorter than he is) he knew as a child. This young man is six feet two inches tall, a little husky, has reddish blond hair, red beard, light skin, freckles, blue eyes - like me, but quite unlike the short-statured, dark, black haired, black eyed American Indian dutiful man he thought of as a father in his childhood or his fairly short, olive-skinned, Spanish mother.
Earlier this week, we actually talked on the phone for the first time, after exchanging a number of emails over the recent past. He made the decision to come for a visit and meet me. I am certain that she, after all these years, has had some kind of "change of heart" and instead of denying the possibility, she may have helped to set this up. (Oddly, several email accounts I have set up using a portion of my real name, she has found and sent me mail) I still have harsh feelings toward her, but the thought that she may have softened and told him some positive things about me and helped us to make contact after all these years, fills me with a need to keep my tone level for his sake - after all, she IS his mother and I am little more than an unknown person from his mother's past.
I know, though. He looks like my father (like me) and he sounds like my brother on the phone. My brother has a "family trait" speech impediment (I do not have it, but several of our sixteen cousins do, as do two of my six uncles) that is caused from an inability to quickly curl the tongue away from the gums when making combination sounds like "sd" or "st" forcing them to draw this sound out very slightly. The impediment is very minor and mostly unnoticeable to the average person, but not quite so to members of the family. Obviously, this is not that much to go on, but when I sent a family pic of all four of us (my own immediate family) taken at Christmas two years ago, he did a photoshop thing, cutting us all out, leaving my son (the eleven year old) in the pic and placing a similarly aged pic of himself next to it, altering the Christmas tree background by replacing all the ornaments with pigs asses (similar sense of humor as well, it seems) and the overall brotherly resemblance was astounding.
Sorry for the "wall of text" response, but I guess I need to explain how very different this situation is from anything else I have had to deal with.
The "other one," who I may have to start calling the middle son (mediusdawg? nah) or some such crap comes around every six months or so. He was here in the early spring. My wife and young ones seem to really like him. At first my daughter ran around telling everyone she had a "grown up brother who had a car and a beard" - two things that she has latched onto that set him apart from all her friends' brothers, I suppose.
