I was ghosted by my Dad

So, funny story, but I’m the result of a holiday romance in Benidorm. It's not quite as chic as Mama Mia, but still, it’s a good two truths one lie fact to pull out at parties. I went my whole life not knowing my biological father, the man with whom I share my DNA.

When I was little, I used to tell people he was a famous bullfighter, which I bizarrely thought was the IT job in Spain?? It turns out he wasn’t performing an outdated, cruel cultural practice for a living; instead, he was a hotel singer in the same hotel I was likely conceived 36 years before.

At age 29, I made a deeply embarrassing attempt to find him. Three Benidorm memory Facebook groups later, and there it was, the page of a man who had been absent from my entire life, a man with an unrecognisable face. I sat on the information I had found for a while, hovering daily on his page and stalking his photos for anything that resembled me, but I couldn’t face sending a message. Until one day, with the help of Google Translate and my husband by my side, I pressed send on a message telling a stranger I was his long-lost daughter.

I had thought of this moment many times before. I imagined he would look just like me; we would have the same brown eyes, olive skin, and round, soft cheeks.

In my version of reality, we would hit it off immediately, and he would welcome me with open arms into his life. He would be a well-loved man with a family and a lovely, beautifully warm home; I would have the family unit I had always dreamed of, only in a much better setting and infinitely better weather. I would learn Spanish and about my heritage, and begin a new life in the sun with a bonus EU passport (thanks a lot, Brexit.)

I gave a hard sell, sharing all my achievements and accolades. On paper, I was an excellent-sounding daughter. I was the first to go to university, had success and career achievements, lived in London, had my own home, and had the financial security I had always dreamed about. But most importantly, I had a loving husband and seriously wonderful friends.

Three dots appeared as he began to type. My palms were sweaty from nerves as I stared intently at the screen. After a few broken exchanges (my very bad Spanish and his English), all my dreams, wishes, and hopes fell apart, typed word by word. Finally, I was left on read.

I was ghosted by my dad.

Instead of a Davina McCall-style long-lost family reunion, with a journey into being fluent in Spanish, I got soft-blocked on Facebook and had to download Duolingo instead.

Why did I put myself through something so mortifying, you ask? Truthfully, I think I was having an identity crisis. I had always struggled with myself and who I was, and was desperate to see myself in someone else.

I had spent my whole life thinking that a piece of me was missing because I didn’t know who my biological father was. I can’t lie and say it didn’t hurt to be rejected for the second time by a man who never wanted part of my life or to ever be a father to me.

Rejection is never easy to swallow, but I realised something as I ruminated on the whole thing. It’s not biology that defines a Dad; it’s much more than that.

It’s someone who takes you to school every day as you sit on the front handlebars of his bike, teaches you to ride your own bike, picks you up and rubs the gravel off your knees each time you fall off. It’s the person who takes you out to pick Chestnuts at Christmas to boil in the tiny back kitchen where you grew up. The man who takes you blackberry picking on long bike rides in the local wetlands and lets you eat them from the bushes with purple fingers as you go. Who teaches you to swim, and rewards you with a battered sausage wrapped in paper from the chippy leaving a golden sheen across your face which he would wipe away with the hanky he would always carry in his pocket.

It’s someone who shares his Sunday-cooked dinner from the seat of his knee, a fork for him, a fork for me. A man who goes with you to see the university you might attend as the first person in the family ever to go. It’s a man who has nothing but gives everything to help you get through the formative years of your life, who endures the teenage angst and the journey to adulthood and who welcomes the next man in your life with trust and care. Each milestone comes with no judgment, no matter the choices, just a steady, long, enduring presence that feels constant and safe.

My dad is my Grandfather, or as most of you know him, my Granch. I don’t need to know who I am from biology; I know who I am because of him—the dad I never had but always had with him.