The Saga Continues…

I hope that some of you are still interested in this very LONG story, which could in reality be summed up thusly: “A man and a woman have a child. Child grows up without man. Meets him at age 21.” The end. But we like stories, we like to know how things come about, why we are who we are, etc. So I’ll continue. Today, Part II.

Belated Fatherhood
by Susan Stanley (continued)

Joycelyn Ward
Fleeing the Father

The meaning of a tale depends upon the teller. With each telling, the tale shifts, choosing how it wants to be told. We sift, resift and sift still again, accommodating our evolving notions of reality, of what “really happened.” The telling differs from the last time it was told. Next time, it will differ still.

Take that geometry teacher back at Thomas Downey High School. Michael Wells thought Mr. Higgs was terrific. Not to Joycelyn Ward: “As far as I was concerned, this man was a klutz…my memory of him was him giving us problems to do, and then sitting there reading!”

For Ward, raising her two children alone, excluding their fathers, was a choice. But as she only lately has come to understand, that choice was made not for reasons once thought. Hers is a tale of a childhood broken and damaged, of the betrayal of a young girl’s trust in adults. It is also a tale of how the sexual abuse of children ripples through the next generation and, perhaps, to the unborn children who will follow.

Joycelyn Ward, now 48, works as a business consultant in Sacramento. She begins her tale with cheery elan: I was born in Oakland in an elevator – breech! And as we say, my life has been up and down and backwards ever since. Her father, “in construction,” died when she was 6. By then, the child had lived in 26 California towns. Her widowed mother remarried, to a man whose job also kept the family on the go. By the time she was in high school, Joyce Ward was living with her great-aunt in Modesto.

Enrolling in Berkeley in the fall of 1960, Ward – by now calling herself Joycelyn – majored first in anthropology but changed her area of study frequently. In the spring of 1963, depressed by the death of her great aunt, she quit college. For a time involved with a musician, she became pregnant, then split up with him. Late in that first pregnancy, she married a friend, and erstwhile roommate of Wells.

The night of Julie’s conception, when Wells came by to see his old high school friend, Ward believed she was already pregnant by her husband, from whom she was estranged. It was, she points out, the 1960s, an era of “free love” in which “just friends” slept together with more abandon than today. It was also, she says, the only time she and Wells got together in this way.

Expecting her baby to arrive in mid-November, Ward didn’t give birth until New Year’s Eve (J’s note…that should have been a clue right there, plus I was only 5.3 lbs, pretty small for a kid 6 weeks overdue!). Ward and her husband were divorced that year, 1965, and it was a long time before she grasped that she had borne Wells’ child. Only when their mutual high school friend brought up the resemblance between Wells and her daughter did the situation become clear.

After Julie was born, she returned to Berkeley, graduating in ’68, moved to Stockton for a while, and then to Alaska. “I kind of just lost track of where people were, didn’t make any great effort to get back in touch with them.”

Ward’s reaction to her first pregnancy was similar to what followed her second – “I just chose to disappear,” she says. “It wasn’t like any great big huge choice thing.” But today she finds a deeper motive for behavior others might view as eccentric.

“I am an incest survivor, and I did not want a man around my children,” she says flatly. During her childhood, an adult family member sexually abused her. Unconscious of how the abuse figured in her decision to flee her children’s fathers, Ward spent more than two decades denying the pattern she’d created before she began to grasp the implications.

“We were sitting around the kitchen. Julie and my son, Richard, and I, and she said something – I can’t even remember what, but it was so much like Michael, it was just incredible. And I said, ‘You are just like your father!” And she said, ‘I am not!‘ And I said, ‘What?‘ And she said, ‘When I have children, I’ll damned well know where they are!’ And I went, ‘What have I done?'”

Realizing the time had come to track down Michael Wells, Joycelyn Ward was surprised to find she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Three months passed, “while all these barriers broke down.” Finally, one Tuesday morning she called Wells’ father in Modesto, got his phone number, and made that fateful call to Portland.

Ward later decided to contact her son’s father. But getting through to this man, now a rock-music luminary, was not so easy: Five full months dragged by before they talked. When they did, he said another, younger son had recently died, and that he was emotionally unready to meet Richard. Still, father and son have spoken on the phone several times and exchanged letters. Ward believes now that both men, given the chance, would have willingly participated in the support and rearing of their children.

When her high school friend spotted Julie’s resemblance to Wells, Ward recalls thinking, “How could I be blind to this for three years, I have no idea! Except willfully blind, I suppose…”

In her version of the story, Michael Wells called Joycelyn Ward soon after the perceptive friend’s visit. The call may have been, she thinks, to tell her his wife was pregnant with twins. “And I said, ‘By the way, Katy thinks I should’ve named her Michelle…the resemblance is really striking.’ I thought he understood…”

Joycelyn Ward believes she did a good job raising two children alone. She earned a master’s degree in Montessori education and taught school. Struggling enough to make ends meet, she and her children celebrated Christmas a few days late in order to take advantage of post-holiday sales. Economically, “we weren’t even middle class,” she says. “On the other hand, it never seemed to matter a whole heck of a lot.”

Ward doesn’t spend much time on regrets. “I did what I could do. And I’m not sure of it. It would’ve been….different if I’d done it differently. But who knows?”

Julie Ward’s Story
Dreaming of a Father

When Julie Ward, now 24, remembers her childhood, she recalls feeling jealous of other kids who had fathers. “Not too much when I was little, that’s the weird thing,” she says. “It was more when I was 16, 14, maybe through 17, that it started really bothering me.”

Like many young children, she felt responsible in some mysterious way for her father’s absence. “I thought that I didn’t have a father because I wasn’t good enough…I remember when I was little, always thinking that it would be very tragic if I were to get married, and my father not know about it. And I was upset that he didn’t know I was graduating from high school. Just those big things – I thought, you know, even if he’s not going to be here, I thought he should know about it.”

In her imagining, she never dreamt of her parents being together – “My mom, she didn’t have a lot of boyfriends or anything” – and somehow she stopped herself from talking to her mother about how she felt. “I thought if I started talking about it, it would hurt her somehow.”

But she knew, vaguely, about her dad. That his name was Michael Wells, that he had twin daughters, that he was married. She understood that Wells’ wife might not know the whole story, that it might damage his marriage if she were discovered. “I understood it wouldn’t be the best idea to just show up one day and say, ‘Here’s your daughter!'” And yet she resented it: “It just made me mad that they were letting etiquette get in the way.”

“I would move heaven and earth to be with my children,” she says.

Because of her mother’s frequent comments on the father-daughter resemblance, Julie built up a picture of her phantom father. “She told me things like that he went to New York one summer and tried to give away flowers to people in the street, and they crossed the street to get away from him because they thought he was a weird hippie!” It was an image she would keep in her mind. “And she told me that he’d gone to jail, or almost gone to jail, a couple of times because of avoiding the draft, or protesting against the draft. So I thought that he was someone whose morals I could respect. And that, I think, is part of the reason that it hurt me. If he was a slimeball, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me that he wasn’t around. But it seemed like I could respect his morals, but not in this instance.”

When the arrangement was finally made for father and daughter to meet, Julie Ward was studying at San Francisco State College (J’s note…it’s University, thank you very much) and working as a desk clerk at the Ramada Inn (J again…Ramada Renaissance, if that matters in the least…huge hotel in SF) in San Francisco. She was an attractive, self-sufficient young woman. And she was terrified.

“I was really afraid that he wouldn’t like me, and that he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. I guess because I thought he hadn’t liked me all along. Because if he’d liked me, he would’ve been there. And so I thought, ‘Well, what’s so great about me that I’m going to be able to change his mind?'”

Tomorrow: Part III
The Reunion