Be warned: This is a tale that I have stitched together from random facts shared to me by relatives and strangers alike, and sprinkled with my own faded memories. In those memories and random facts, the dates of my conception do not line up to the timeline of my birth. I have, therefore created my own timeline. I must admit I like this fact: That I own the story of how I came to be.
A fact: I was born in Los Angeles and raised by a single, immigrant, Mexican mother in East Los Angeles. Due to lack of childcare, I was passed between Los Angeles and Mexico for most of my youth. I was an inquisitive child, eager to know a mystical person that my mother’s friends would sometimes mention, a man named Manny that my mother had been married to, my papa.
At the age five, on hot sticky Los Angeles night, he called for the first time. My mother asked if I wanted to speak to “tu papa.” I said yes with yearning of a fatherless child. I can still feel the heaviness of the faded telephone receiver as my tiny hands wrapped around it. I heard his deep voice on the other end asking if I wanted to go to Disneyland with him and his family the following day. Of course I agreed to Disneyland especially with my new papa his “new” family.
His new family at that time was a daughter and an all-American wife, complete with blonde hair and blue eyes who loved NASCAR and Coors Light. His new family welcomed me, taking me shopping for much needed clothing and hosting belated birthdays when I visited them. With time, Manny and his wife would have four children. Then, they too would divorce. The day at Disneyland is the day I gained a papa: Manny Alvarez, the man who gave me my surname, and my father symbol until I reached the age of 14.
A memory: age 14, sitting in a car, my mother driving up the mountain. She hugged each curve, turn by turn, rising up from the San Bernardino valley to Lake Arrowhead where we lived. We had moved us from the inner city to the segregated mountain community four years earlier. I was complaining to her, using my moody teenage tones. “I have nothing in common with that man, or that family. They are like strangers.” I was talking about my papa, Manny.
He did not feel like family. I did not feel the connection I imagined a family should give me. During the years of visits, I would be grasping at straws trying to find commonalities between us, looking for similar tastes, similar facial features, for anything. I’m not sure what triggered my mother’s confession. But that evening, her hands gripping the steering wheel on each turn up the mountain, she said the words that forever changed my life.
“No es tu papa, es otro hombre” – “He is not your father. It is another man.”
She did not allow any pause for me to absorb the news. The gates were opened, she told me everything. My father was a man whom she had work with many years ago at a hotel. They were in a short relationship, and then she broke it off, proceeding rapidly to marry Manny, not knowing she was already pregnant. (This is my version of the story). He was of Irish decent, she said, a well-off American, and he owned a restaurant in Santa Barbara that we had visited when I was three years old. I sobbed with the knowledge that my papa was a stranger, and that my feelings of uneasiness were not me, I was right, I could Trust my gut.
The Search
My mother gave me my only link to him she had, an old business card from his restaurant. She asked me not to search for him until I was eighteen. I was a rebellious teenager, I did not listen. For the next few months, I searched for my father helped by the local librarians.
Of course, I had immediately called the number printed on the card. A soft voice had answered. She sounded hurried, I could hear kids in the background. A mother and she was partly confused with an uneasy laugh. She did not understand why she was still getting calls about this restaurant, but was kind enough to give me the number of the new restaurant in the same location. The next call was to the current restaurant owner, which led me to another business nearby in which the owner knew my father. She told me about his restaurant and that he had moved with his new wife to Japan about ten years ago.
I felt defeated and lost. I needed to find this man, this possible link to the person I was or was becoming. As I started to thank her for sharing a glimpse of my father, she cautiously stated “have you thought of looking for your grandparents? They still live in Santa Barbara. Your grandfather’s name is Roger Smith.”
Ah ha, a new link!
Then call after call, standing in a local phone booth, using saved quarters and dimes to extend the time on the phone when needed. I started a new search. I requested the white pages from Santa Barbara County and saved up for new roll of quarters. Thankfully, there were only four Roger Smiths in Santa Barbara in 1995. Calling the first one, I left a message; I would try calling back tomorrow. With the innocence of a child, my message went somewhat like, “Hi. My name is Tamara. I am looking for a Roger Smith who has a son named Bruce. I think I am Bruce’s daughter and would like to talk to him.”
The second person, I started leaving the same message but she picked up before I finished. With the grace of age, she told me it might not be a good idea to share that type information over an answering machine. With those words, in that moment, I gained some wisdom and understood the gravity of my search. So, as I dialed the next number, after contemplating the previous caller’s advice, I decided to start the conversation by asking if they knew anyone by the name of Bruce Smith. To my surprise the phone was quickly answered and a stern male voice came through the receiver
“Hello. My name is Tamara and I am searching for a man name Bruce Smith. Do you know anyone by that name?”
“Yes. That’s my son. Why do you ask?”
There was a pause in time as I gathered my courage and explained the situation, that he had dated my mother many years ago, and that I was the result of that courtship. My grandfather updated me on my father’s whereabouts. He had moved back from Japan, and was living in Berkeley with his wife. He gave me his telephone number. I scribbled it down on the corner of the phone book, and thanked him.
The Call
Once again, with the yearning of a fatherless child, I quickly dialed the number with the remainder of coins I had for the day. He picked up. “Hello?” his voice had a slight accent and the formality of a proper education. The slight accent, I would come to find out, was the result of speech therapy due to being born partially deaf. “Hi. My name is Tamara and I believe I am your daughter.” Not giving him a moment to doubt the situation I explained “You and my mother had dated 14 years ago, and I am a result of that relationship.”
He was calm and pensive, “Oh, I see,” he said “I remember your mother, but I am not sure if I am your father. She was married at the time.” We proceed to speak for what in my mind was hours, but the reality was that I was at a phone booth, and it could not have been more than 15 minutes. In that short conversation I shared why I thought he was my father, the lack of emotional connection or physical resemblance to my papa. We also learned a little about each other. I told him I was learning to play the violin, was good at school, and enjoyed reading. He had tried to play the violin as well in college and loved books. Already, there was more in common than with my papa. He said he would call me another time, and I gave him my number.
As a responsible adult, my father proceeded to contact my mother the following day. I was in trouble. She had already asked him for help when I was younger, and did not want to be refused again; she did not want anything to do with that man. I continued to speak with him on occasion, learning more about his life, and sharing my life with him.
That summer, I left for Mexico, as I always did, to spend the summer studying Spanish. But this year, my mother called me back early before the sweltering heat of southern California had calmed down. My father was coming from Berkeley to Southern California to meet me.
The Meeting
We arranged to meet in the lobby of the local mountain lodge, one of the few places with overnight accommodations on the mountainside where we lived. Here I was, a 14 year old girl, straggly hair, trying to define myself, hoping this person would provide answer to who I was.
That day, 2 pm could not come quickly enough. I paced in my bedroom, waiting until it was time. I arrived alone at the lodge, my mother already there working. The lodge was saturated with “flat towners,” the folks who lived at the bottom of the mountain and did not know how to drive on the mountain roads. I looked through the crowd of people, and I can only describe it as a cheesy, Hallmark movie scene, where the crowds parted and there he was, a tall, skinny man, wearing a straw hat, the same thin lips and smile I had, the same malformed nose. We saw each other, we embraced, and I was home.
That afternoon, with my mother at work, I spent the day getting to know my father, my stepmother, and my half-brother. We walked to the town center, browsed the small shops filled with things you do not need, but desperately want. We walked and talked and my nervousness started to ease. I asked plain questions, and looked for answers to confirm our similarity: favorite foods, favorite color, and favorite candy? The answer to the last question caught me off guard, a vignette of my life story. I asked, and simultaneously, we both said “Good & Plenty.” That was the moment I was reassured that this stranger was my father. The assurance is so strong, for both of us, we have never done a blood test to confirm paternity. We didn’t need to.
The thing is, there is a parallel story that never leaves my mind: What if I had not met him?
The summer I met my father, I lived at the edge of an elite, white, upper-class community. At the periphery were the undocumented workers that built their homes and cleaned their floors. I was part of this community. My mother was a housekeeper at the hotel where my father and I met. On her days off, we would clean houses. By the age of 10, I knew how to dust and put things back as I found them, so as not to disturb the home owner’s way of life. My mother taught me the art of cleaning, of maintaining the home owner’s perceived privacy, as we cleaned up their secrets, their hidden bottle of alcohol, the overpriced makeup that no longer matched their tans.
Saturday evenings were the highlight of my week. My community would gather at Lady of our Lake Catholic Church for the Spanish service, the only one offered within a twenty-mile radius. After the service, we would flock to someone’s home, whether a small house or an apartment shared by multiple families, and celebrate a birthday, a baptism, a marriage, any excuse for a celebration. And on those Saturday evenings, we would dance.
I had my first of many innocent crushes at these dances. I would blush when I would be asked to dance, wearing an appropriate below the knees length dress. My only world was that of an immigrant, fighting for their rights, making a voice for ourselves our responsibility as the first generation, struggling, going to church, and looking forward to the Saturday evening dances.
I can still smell my musty bedroom and see myself laying solitary on the skinny bed writing after the dances. I recently found an old journal from that era, the time before my father. I had gone searching in these journals to find a more factual reaction to the time I meet my father instead of leaning on memories ages by time. As I read the words of my fourteen year old self, I realized, I had a palpable urgency to meet a boy, get married and have a baby. At that point in my life, it was a plan that I could accomplish and was accepted. I could meet a boy, and have baby, all before I would turn 17. And then, finally, I would really be free to live my own life; independent, in that world a child equals freedom from the constraints of your parents. And I wanted that freedom. It was as clear as daylight in my writing. Even now, this very day, I can feel the truth behind this sentiment.
In the immigrant community, you do what you know: You get married. You have a baby. It is shown all around to you. It is your normal. You are a young, innocent voice, and you do not know how to make yourself heard, so you keep yourself busy doing what is expected, helping clean houses, cooking, school work as needed, and then marry. It makes me think of those times you are bored at home, and you are looking for something to entertain you: you cook, sleep, and have a drink, all these things to fill up your time till the real thing happens.
It was like that, my illusory childhood, waiting to be old enough to marry, to have a child; that is, until I met my father.
That summer, I learned my father’s morning ritual of eggs cooked in his oatmeal, and I met his three sisters. We drove to Santa Barbara to meet my three new-found aunts and my cousins. For the first time in my life, I was going to be part of the upper-crust, white community, and not on the edge. The worries of the privileged were more casual in my eyes, versus my worries more based on Maslow’s Hierarchy. But that weekend in Santa Barbara, I did not think about how much something cost, or if should clean the house, or if dinner needed to be cooked. I was able to be a child, to laugh and play with my cousins and half-brother.
That fall, I moved to Northern California to get to know my father better. My first evening in Berkeley, my father and stepmother needed to pop in to a music performance of a fellow classmate of my stepmother. My stepmother was studying music UC Berkeley. As we walked into the small, wooden performance hall, the sunset light glowing, there were only four of five rows of chairs and we took seats in back. I said hello to the many strangers that my parents introduced me to. I was still an awkward, 14-year-old, knowing I did not fit in this crowd. The performance started, and I do not recall if it was cello, or violin, but I do recall thinking it was one of the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. The size of the room made sense. It allowed for the music to come alive, to fill every corner. I did not belong there, but I was there, and that was now my life. The following years were a steep learning curve for my father and me, but as we both evolved, I am happy to call him one of my closest allies.
It is remarkable to think that one simple moment can alter the path of your life. I keep thinking about how much I was complaining to my mother, and if I had not been so adamant about not visiting my papa, where would my life have taken me. Maybe my father’s voice resonated through. Or if I would have been more obedient, would I have been exposed to another world that influenced my future decision? Meeting my father was not just about discovering myself, or why my forehead wrinkles in that pattern, but also about pulling myself away from a subculture I lived in, and to some extent, still defines who I became. The truth in this story is that I would not have been able to be pulled away had I not been introduced to the man I now call my father.
