The Fatherless Hell
June 18, 2011
FATHER’S DAY should be somber and serious, almost a day of grief, in the Western world. Father hunger is everywhere. So many children are raised without intimate, daily contact with their fathers that many of them have a secret longing, and a fixation on fathers, that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. They dream of father. They idolize him. They wonder if they did not deserve him. A present father is human. An absent father is larger than life.
There are parents who never married. There are parents who divorced. Worst of all, there are those children who were deliberately deprived of any link with their natural fathers. Children conceived with anonymous sperm donors live in a fatherless hell, as described this week in Canada’s National Post:
Adult children conceived during the wave of sperm donorship in the early 1980s and early 1990s are now telling their stories. They were wanted and loved children, but because of the way they were conceived, there is a world of hurt and anger out there.
Alana Sveta is a New York based, 20-something college dropout working with an independent film team on a screenplay based on her life as a “donor kid.” In an email interview she wrote that she is obsessed with her genetic heritage, to which she attributes substance abuse and intimacy issues.
Before researching her own genetic history, Alana struggled for years to understand her deep misandry. Men, she discovered, were not her problem; rather it was being raised as if the missing half of her genetic identity were superfluous to her sense of self-worth. “It never occurred to me how truly robbed I was until I started spending time in other people’s homes watching how their fathers interacted with them.” Discussing her feelings of loss with her mother was difficult; she didn’t want to appear ungrateful or critical of her mother’s decision.
A mother’s first duty to a child is to provide him with his father. Everything else pales in comparison.