The Final Chapter

Thanks everyone for sticking with this long, long tale. Luckily, it is one with a happy ending. I met my dad in 1987, this story was written in 1990, and now here we are, almost 20 years into this parent/child relationship. I feel like I know my father now a lot more than I did then, and we have the best relationship one could expect, seeing as how we have never lived in the same state, talk about the same town or house. Being the oldest of his daughters, I got the privledge of being the first to make him a father-in-law, the first to make him a grandfather.

My relationship with my sisters is good, though also always with the knowledge that we’ve never lived close to one another, that we’ll never be as close as if we had shared a childhood. I named my daughter after one of my sisters, and we go visit our Oregon family at least once a year.

On a pretty significant side note, in a way, meeting my father brought Ted and I together. We were in a speech class together at SFState, and on the day I was to meet my father, I went to class. I had dressed up and bought flowers to make my apartment look nice when they arrived. I was very nervous. Ted mentioned that I looked nice. I told him, “I’m meeting my dad today. I hope he likes me.” Ted’s reply was, “Don’t worry, he’s going to love you. Why wouldn’t he?”

With those simple, kind words, he won my heart. He didn’t know it, and I had to hunt him down like an animal in a big game park before he would consent to date me (actually, I didn’t know it, but he was dating someone else right then, so it speaks well of him that he wasn’t that interested), but the fact that he was generous in his words, that added on, “Why wouldn’t he”, and I suddenly couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was…

Now, without further distractions, is the final chapter in the story of the Ward/Wells clan.

Belated Fatherhood
by Susan Stanley

Part III Reunion
Reaching for Happiness

The day they met, Michael Wells and Julie Ward sat in her apartment, talking with each other and the woman who’d brought them together. Then they went to lunch, visited the Museum of Natural History (J’s note, this is never a good idea…take a bleeding heart like mine, amp it up on tension and emotion, and then go look at a bunch of animals that have been murdered and stuffed so they can sit behind glass and have us stare at them. The baby animals did me in, and sobbing ensued.), walked on the beach. Meeting each other at last, both were filled with relief and surprise – Wells, having assumed his daughter had red hair like her mother, discovered she was blond. Julie, having built a fantasy father in her mind, found out hers was a regular person, someone capable of being as nervous about their meeting as she was.

More than two years into their relationship, the father and daughter are still in the discovery phase of their relationship. The trust between them is growing.

Meanwhile, Julie has been integrated into her father’s family circle. Wells’ other daughters were fascinated and accepting from the beginning; their mother’s remarriage already had given them a stepsister, as well as a half-sister and a half-brother.

Wells broke the news to his parents with a letter. In his curious birth announcement, he told them of his daughter, emphasizing Maya and Melissa’s happiness at a new-found sister, and expressed his hope they’d welcome her into the family. His parents were accepting, Wells says, noting that his lifestyle “had softened them up for 20 years.”

Other people’s reactions have varied. “When I’ve talked to friends about this, it’s always sort of a shock to them,” Wells says. “I don’t know if it’s a shock, but I think it brings an awareness to women that this is a particularly male experience. And I think pretty much universally with men – at least with straight men – you can see their eyes get faraway….”

In the months after they met in the Bay Area, Julie came to Portland and met her half-sisters. At a party to present Wells daughter (J’s note…the author of this article, Susan, helped plan the party) to his large and extended family of friends, Julie was welcomed with open arms and bemused smiles, heads shaking at various and uncanny resemblances: bone structure, tilt of the head, several tiny gestures of the hand. It seemed as if anyone who knew Michael Wells could pick this daughter out of a lineup.

Somewhere in all this, Wells says, he came to appreciate the importance of heredity in how personalities develop. Talking on the phone with Julie recently, he bemoaned the piles of papers in his office. “After I hang up,” he said, “I’m going to have to straighten up my projects because they’re getting out of hand.” And Julie, accustomed to a mother so organized that she alphabetizes books on the shelf and arranges her clothing by color, exclaimed, “Oh, I knew I was related to somebody!

Were this a movie of a certain ilk or a romantic novel, Michael Wells and Joycelyn Ward would fall in love, and a latter-day marriage would take place. Or, given the realities of late 20th-century America, at least they would become “a couple.”

“We’re certainly good friends,” Wells admits. “But it just didn’t happen.” About a year after discovering his daughter, Wells became involved with another Julie – Julie Lawrence, with whom he had studied yoga for several years. With Maya and Melissa away in college, the two now share a household.

As for daughter Julie, Wells has seen her “four or five times” and talks with her by phone “monthly, something like that.” She calls him “Dad.” Wells has sent tuition money “a couple of times.” And maybe, someday, he can contribute in other ways: “How about a nice wedding?”

Understandably, the relationship differs from that shared with his other daughters. “We’re always going to be people who met as adults, and that’s different.” Yes, they talk about their feelings toward each other, but the tone of their conversation is always controlled, careful. “Lacking the usual history, it’s like we’re on good behavior,” Wells says.

Meeting her father has changed Julie’s relationship with her mother. “In some ways, she really makes me mad,” the daughter says, “because I found out it was mostly her that separated us.” Yet the revelation has caused her to understand her mother, to sympathize more profoundly with the reasons behind her decision, “and so I love her more.”

As for her father, she says, “I love him, but I don’t know him very well. In some ways, I think I appreciate him more. I have some friends, they don’t want to spend time with their parents. They don’t like their parents. I appreciate my dad a lot. I appreciate the fact that he’s here now. I think I appreciate him more, but I don’t think I have the same relationship with him that other people have with their parents.”

The curious circumstances of her childhood make the relationship with her father complicated. Less complicated is the friendship she’s forged with her half-sisters, who have given her the sense of family she’d longed for. During her first visit to Portland two years ago, Maya and Melissa Wells lay down to take naps, and she noticed them put pillows on top of their faces. “And I said, ‘That’s pretty strange – I do that, too!’ Whenever something is common with us, it really makes me feel like I belong.”

Julie Ward’s views on her own future parenthood are definite.

“I don’t ever want my kids to have just one parent. Anything short of an abusive parent, I would stick around until the kids were old enough, were older. If the guy was a jerk or something, forget it…Even if we did get divorced, I would do my darndest to make sure that they had a really good relationship with their father and with me. Just one of the worst things that I could imagine happening, next to my husband or my child dying, would be getting a divorce. I just can’t picture it.”