I’ve decided not to meet my surrendered daughter right now.

In short, I’m not ready.

It was supposed to have happened already, but I never set a date. And I’m more than okay with that. Relieved actually.

Because, at one point, I felt like an aluminum can on a NASCAR track: emails from her then the mother, then the mother again, and again, then her. I was all: holy fuck this is moving way too fast for me. Must. Slow. Down.

Each message had one goal: meet now.

And I was all: meet later.

I’m liking things at a distance right now and I never thought I would feel like this. Never.

Whether this decision is right or wrong is of no consequence. It is what it is.

—

Then part of me is very Nike about the whole thing: Just Do it.

Which may be the guilt, but she’s so far away and enigma-like that it doesn’t overwhelm me and I can push it down. Way down. Abyss down. Barely even think about it down.

Except her birthday is right before Thanksgiving.

So it’s there.

Under the surface.

Like a whale. Not an elephant.

—

It’s the expectation of it all. The fairy tale. And we all know fairy tales don’t exist. I — as she has imagined me — do not exist.

—

I used to think, until I met one particular person, that my life was — and excluding my 15th year and concealed pregnancy — pretty normal. And then I realized it’s been anything but and the people who, at the time,  I surrounded myself with had it hard too: abusive fathers, crazy mothers, sexual abuse, abortions, drug use, dead friends, no opportunity.

And then I heard a smidge of pity.

Which is where the haves and the have-nots divide.

I actually heard it divide when I told my friend that not only did I know a heroin addict, I used to date one, and he, for a time, was a prostitute. After we dated.

And there were two more that I knew and died. Before I turned 23.

I ate, which meant I didn’t drug.

I just happened to be friends with some really fucked up people. And, by extension, I looked normal until normal came walking through the door.

Look, if you want your life to appear exciting, find a world traveler from an ivy league school and call it a day. Then re-think every day before it.

I remember thinking: I’m pretty certain I was just pitied.

Oh man.

Because that is not — at all — how I see myself, my life, or my choices. Actually, you have to have fallopian tubes of steel to hand over a child and carry on. Regardless of what came before or after it.

—

The pity party made me re-evaluate what holes I need to bust in the fairy tale; which is pretty much all of them. I want to correspond. Work up to meeting. Find a way to lessen — even if it’s by 1% — the pressure of not knowing each other and yet fully knowing one another at the same time.

Warts and all.