Don’t be fooled; I pack plenty of bad baggage

(iStock photo by PerfectVectors)

(Editor’s note: All events described in this post took place as described, but some names have been changed in deference to the privacy of others.)

Since my earliest memories I have known I was adopted. For nearly as long, I have known my biological parents were teenagers.

None of that was particularly scandalizing to me because once I experienced the sensations of puberty, it seemed clear to me how such a thing might happen.

Less clear to me now is how I believed such a thing could never happen to me. Because the fact is, well into young adulthood, I was preoccupied with sex. I wanted to have a lot of it, even though I knew I was unprepared for the responsibility of fatherhood.

Thank God my efforts were generally more clumsy that fruitful.

But I did not always strike out.

And perhaps no relationship better exemplifies the muddled morality of my youth than the three or four months of my sophomore year of college when I was Jessica’s boyfriend.

Jessica, you see, was a single mother, and our first date was practically on a dare.

My friend Dan introduced us. A few days earlier, he and a couple of my other buddies, back home from college, pulled behind a car full of young ladies in a Burger King drive-thru after a night of winter-break bar-hopping. Emboldened by their buzzes, they leaped from their vehicle and shouted their best pick-up lines at the car ahead of them. I would have been right in the middle of all this, but I was covering a high school basketball game for The State newspaper, as I did on most Friday nights during the winter.

My buddies’ lines must have been pretty smooth, though, since the three girls from the car in front spent the rest of the night with the three guys behind them in the drive-thru line. Dan even scored a date later that weekend with Rachel, one of the girls in the group. Nothing much came of the other two pairings, though. Jim had a girlfriend back at Clemson and wasn’t interested in more than one night of innocent flirtation.

And Tyler wanted nothing to do with the girl nudged in his direction.

“What was wrong with her?” I asked Jim, who was filling me in on what I had missed the night before.

“She just had a baby,” Jim replied.

“A baby? How old is she?”

“I don’t know, only a few months, I think,” Jim responded, knowing full well what I meant.

“Not the baby, smartass. The girl.”

We laughed.

“I’m not sure — 18, I think,” Jim continued. “She said ‘baby,’ and suddenly Tyler developed a curfew.”

We laughed again.

“You want to go out with her?” Dan interrupted tauntingly, offering a double date half in jest.

“What, you think I won’t? Tyler might be scared, but I ain’t scared of no baby,” I boasted.

So the next night, Dan introduced me to Jessica. She was demure and attractive — blonde, tall and remarkably slender for someone who had recently given birth, I thought. I liked the slight rasp of her voice and found her accent vaguely reminiscent of my cousins in Kentucky.

She had attended the same high school as Dan and I, though we were not in the same class and did not remember her. Neither Jessica nor Rachel were going to college, and both were still living with their parents, albeit under far different circumstances. Rachel was outgoing, loved music and parties, and lived at home primarily because it was the most affordable way to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. Jessica, on the other hand, stared adulthood straight in the face. She lived with her parents because that was the only way she could manage single motherhood.

Though I was hardly head over heels, I liked Jessica from the start. I also impressed myself by not balking at dating someone with a child. I have no idea why I thought this impressive. I never looked after Jessica’s daughter. Or provided clothing or food for her. Or even spent any time playing with her. Jessica showed enough sense not to bring her infant daughter around me or any other stranger who might not be around for long.

For that matter, I had little contact with the rest of her family. Jessica and I arranged our time together around her parents’ babysitting availability. I rolled into her driveway to pick her up and rolled out again, pausing occasionally to say hello but always leaving three abstractions in the rearview mirror as Jessica and I rolled out again.

Basically, Jessica and I dated like middle schoolers, seeing each other when her parents’ schedule allowed and filling in the gaps with phone calls that often stretched for hours.

And we always seemed to have things to talk about.

I was the first guy Jessica dated seriously after giving birth, and many of our conversations consisted of me trying to convince her that it was OK for her to have a boyfriend and a baby at the same time. I insisted that she shouldn’t feel guilty about asking her parents to look after her daughter when we went out — she needed a break, and they probably enjoyed fussing over their granddaughter. I pressed these arguments with an air of sagacity, but my reasoning was obvious and self-serving.

I wanted Jessica’s focus fixed on me, not the people she left back home when we were together.

In the final tally, I sidled up to a young woman enmeshed in a life-altering circumstance. She could have used a friend. Instead, she ran into someone collecting novel life experiences as if they were baseball cards, someone who then lost interest the instant his desire was attained.

Jessica warrants no criticism for giving in to me from time to time. My arguments might have made her feel less guilty about carrying on with me, but they did not detract her from her daughter’s care in any way I could discern. She still stayed home a lot when I wanted to go out. She also talked often about getting a job that would allow her to raise her girl without so much financial help from her parents.

Moreover, Jessica seemed to be a good mother — certainly as good as someone so unprepared for motherhood could be. She seldom complained about her situation and did not blame others for it, even though she had cause to do so.

After a few weeks of dating, Jessica opened up to me during one of our late-night calls about how she became a single mother. She began haltingly, as if unsure the telling would bring her relief or merely confirm the foolishness of which she already suspected herself.

But I assured her that she could trust me with her story, so she did.

A couple of years earlier, Jessica began dating the son of a church pastor, who also went to our high school — a guy I knew, though not well. They were sexually active, and her boyfriend sometimes tried to persuade Jessica to have sex on church property after youth meetings. That seemed to be his “thing.” Finally, she acceded.

Then, Jessica got pregnant.

As she described to me how she and her parents were left to care for her daughter on their own, I pressed the phone receiver hard against my burning ear, anger prickling the back of my neck and stiffening my jaw. The only support her boyfriend offered was to pay half the cost of a visit to the sardonically labeled “family planning clinic.” Which is to say he planned no family at all, for when Jessica insisted on keeping her baby, he broke up with her.

She could have pressed her case in court, she supposed, and while that might have brought a little money, it almost certainly would have brought more acrimony than it was worth. So she let her daughter’s father off the hook.

As I have said, men can run, and they often do.

“Damn, if I ever run into that asshole …,” I growled into the phone.

My anger was genuine, but my bluster mere bravado. Jessica’s ex-boyfriend was a lot bigger than me, so had I actually run into that asshole, my choices probably would have amounted to saying nothing or suffering a swift ass whuppin’. I can admit this now: I would have selected the former.

And for all of my seething, I was about to deal Jessica another unkindness — not on the order of leaving her alone to face a lifelong responsibility, but an unkindness just the same.

After a few months, the novelty of dating a girl with a baby dissipated, and planning time together around her parents’ schedule became increasingly bothersome to me. In hindsight, it seems obvious that this was bound to be a short-term relationship, and my eventual desire to exit was unsurprising if disappointing. But the manner of my departure was shameful.

Remember Rachel?

Not long after Dan returned to school for the spring semester, her relationship with him ended. Nonetheless, I still saw her frequently with Jessica. In fact, occasionally, the two of us would hang out when Jessica wasn’t around. We both acknowledged it was decidedly uncool to live in our parents’ homes and began talking about getting a place together — at first, with one or two other roommates, but as the banter progressed, our plans narrowed to just the two of us. Strictly platonic, of course.

But soon, I was spending as much time on the phone with Rachel as I was with Jessica, under the guise of making living arrangements, though we were discussing many other things and discovering many mutual interests. In reality, neither of us had the financial means to move out, but the search remained a pretext to spend time together. Then one night, while driving around in my Dodge Daytona, splitting a six-pack and pretending to scope out apartment complexes … well … I pulled to the shoulder of an unlit road, and there in the dark, we surrendered to our true motives.

By the next morning, we both were guilt-ridden over our betrayal of Jessica, but not enough to stop what we were doing. We confessed to her immediately, and rather than reacting angrily, Jessica said she understood and even expected this might happen. She could plainly see what neither Rachel nor I were modest enough to conceal.

Jessica’s understanding made me feel even worse… which is precisely what I deserved.

I could proffer many hollow arguments that what I did was not so bad in the grand scheme. We all were young, Jessica and I had not dated that long, and, in the end, things worked out well for her and her daughter. Though I have not spoken with her in many years, we reconnected on Facebook. Jessica seems well. Her daughter is grown now, and she is smart, happy and successful, graduating from a prestigious, out-of-state nursing school. It would be the height of hubris to suggest my cheating should have left Jessica forever in shambles. She clearly survived me, and apparently without much trouble.

But that’s hardly the point.

In the final tally, I sidled up to a young woman enmeshed in a life-altering circumstance. She could have used a friend. Instead, she ran into someone collecting novel life experiences as if they were baseball cards, someone who then lost interest the instant his desire was attained. Not only did I toss aside the relationship; by throwing over Jessica for her best friend, I could not have done so in a more callous way.

Further, what Rachel and I did was no accident. It was the product of two plans hatched without conspiracy but converging at precisely the same intended point — we went after something that, in the moment, was more pleasurable than what we had, never mind the consequences for our consciences or those around us.

As one might imagine, treachery was no foundation for a relationship: Rachel and I never did move in together and dated for only a few months before wandering apart to pursue the next shiny things that appeared in our dating lives.

Yes, men can run, and I sometimes did.

I've used recent posts to make strong moral claims about sexual propriety, parenthood and culture’s corrosive effect on them both. It’s OK if you disagree. I suspect a lot of people do. Just don’t think that I’m judging myself by a different standard. I’m down in the pit with everyone else.

But before we return to the search for my birth mother, I need to tell you what happened because of one other man who ran. And I should also tell you about two who did not.

If you want to know how crisis pregnancies ought to be handled, they are far better exemplars than I am.

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