Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

The biggest error I've made in working with my father's family is that I judged my father by his words, when I should have been paying closer attention to his actions. My father is a pathological liar.

Obviously he lied when he had an affair with my mother. He lied to both my mother and his wife at the time. Than he lied to his children. But the most interesting part of this is he lied to me too. You might be thinking, why is that interesting? Well, the way I saw it is that he never had any reason to lie to me. I knew his darkest secret, I knew his greatest fallacy. And while he never owned up to the truth to even me, he never pretended to me that he didn't conceive me out of wed-lock or that I wasn't anything more than a secret love-child that should be kept a secret. But here is what he told me in a letter that is not dated but written sometime in 1992 when I was just 19,

"Your grandmother _______ called me in March of 1973 to and asked me to see you and your mother at the hospital. I had vowed not to see your mother, you I went to see" 

The letter was significant because it also included a letter to my mother. I remembered giving the letter to my mother in 1992. But as the years went by I lost track of a number of letters. Well that's not entirely true, the reality is that in desperate attempts over the years to end the pain of abandonment, I burned many letters from both my father and his mother. I had assumed I burned this letter too. I remember it for not only the significance of it being the only correspondence I've ever known to this date to include both my parents, it also was significant in it's description of how they met and of the loved they shared. It's the only time the story of my conception was painted with a taint of love (albeit a shameful one) rather than just the brush of deceitfulness and awfulness.

So fast forward to 2008, I didn't know where the letter was and now not being nearly as afraid to ask my parents for some of the information of the past I asked the both if either of them remembered the letter. Both my mother and my father swore that no letter was written or received and because now I had realized that there were many stories I had blacked out (such as throwing my father out of my apartment when my daughter was born) that I didn't trust my memories.

As things progressed after my father's confession in 2008 I struggled to finally feel loved and for the most part it just never came. My father would tell me he loved me and I wanted to believe it so I clung to the words, but the bruised side of my heart was reluctant to follow. And so in the back and forth of this dialogue of my father trying to convince me that he loved me was also a struggle he was having to walk a thin line with his wife and children. That narrative was much different than the one in the letter of 1992. The narrative with his other children was that while he had an affair, he never saw me and never had an opportunity to see me until I sought him out in 1992.

And to this effect a very coincidental sequence of events happened. In January of 2012 he sent me an email to lay down the events of history which was that he never saw me and knew nothing of me until I was 19. 

Later that night, I had found my only memory box from when I was a child. The box is a large moving box with an odd assortment of stuff thrown in it. It was put together by my step-grandmother and most of the items in the box relate to my step-grandfather's firefighting events. And among those items are a handful of other photos and letters. Every time I see this box I say to myself, I'm going to organize that and figure out what I want and don't want and properly store the things I want to keep. But than I get half-way through the box and the misery of the past is too much I throw the damn thing back under the stairs in worse shape than it was when I started.

This time, as I went through it, I stumbled upon the letter. And now the contradiction of my father's words are in my hand and in my email and are without question indisputable.

These are things I cannot grasp or understand. I suppose he wanted to make me feel better when I was 19 by making up some story that he kept track of me and watched over me. But logically, how does saying, "yeah I saw you as a helpless infant the day you were born but I decided I'd leave anyway" make me feel better. But that's just the point, the lie was never intended to make me feel better. It was always about making him feel better.

So be careful. Pay careful attention to another's actions and their body language and dismiss their words entirely. Especially if you know they are a pathological liar.

~ Matthew 7:20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.