I don’t remember ever feeling illegitimate; not on account of not knowing my father, at any rate. I saw all the after-school specials, the "very special episode" of Growing Pains, and I know I was supposed to nurture the secret belief that my father was a spy or a wealthy politician, that he would pull up one day in a roaring Lambourghini and shower me with riches. I was supposed to hate him for "abandoning" me, or hate my mother for driving him away, hate my grandparents or god or Ronald Reagan or anyone. I was supposed to have some fucking angst.

In fact, I never felt any of those things. Well into my teens, I didn’t have a father; he was a nonperson. I associated the concept of "father" with the process of conception (of which I was aware from an early age; no storks for me), and it was a long while before it really occurred to me as a solid and genuine fact that there was some physical entity, some man out there who shared half my genes. Curiosity developed, but it was trivial, self-centered: was he robust and healthy, or did he have some strange disease; was he tall or short; was he a redhead, too; was he (gasp) balding? What was there in me, physical or psychological, that originated with him?

I suppose I might have been more concerned with my bastardom had I been more committed to the nuclear family. I’ve been involved in a number of different household arrangements, and I’ve got to say, the daddy/mommy/kids model has some definite drawbacks; don’t tell the Republicans, but I’m kind of glad my dad ran off.

The conservative view these days is that a child needs both mother and father. Thus single mothers, homosexual parents, and the like are gross abominations tearing our society apart at the roots. Buzz word: Family Values. Reagan actually tried to pass a bill in the late eighties that would deny federal funding to battered women’s shelters because we have to keep families together at all costs. Conservative wisdom tells us that little boys need strong male role models; strong enough to put mothers in the hospital?

The truth is, I didn’t have much in the way of role models in my early years. My mother married when I was five, and prior to that my memories are of myself and my uncle, five months younger than me; adults are conspicuously absent. We lived with my grandparents and the two or three kids they still had home, and growing up for me was a very independent business. My reasoning abilities advanced more quickly than average, due in large part, I think, to that early independence. I had an extensive opportunity to take in raw data without having a parental perspective imposed upon it, and thus I was forced to begin assessing this information on my own. Perhaps it was a kind of neglect, that I was left to work out my identity on my own, but it sure beat indoctrination. By the time my mother entered into her marriage (which would last seven years, neatly spanning elementary school), I was able to see her new husband as a person. I was not immediately jealous of him, as television and Dr. Freud tell us one should be in such a situation, nor did I embrace him in some vast hunger for male bonding. Instead, I assessed.

Unfortunately, he did not stand up well to such assessment. He was decent in a moral sense, but incredibly ineffectual. He was weak-willed and dull-minded, lacking in ambition and self-respect. Since mother divorced him, she has found two others, each new mate an overcompensation for the last. Her lover of the last seven years or so has proven to be a typical hypermasculine dolt, the kind of shallow white trash stereotype one associates with the term "wifebeater," though he generally sticks to verbal abuse. His was a masculinity equivalent to running a race and employing someone to shoot him in the leg each time he approached the finish line; his sense of himself as a man was dependent upon avoiding certain concepts which might endanger his self image if he only thought them to himself, among them things like fallibility, weakness, femininity, and homosexuality. When any of these concepts enter his mind or his environment, he drops whatever fragile logic chain he might have been attempting and responds with instinctive, blind anger. Studies show that, with greater education, both men and women abandon the more extreme gender roles, opting for androgyny. It seems impossible that it could be any other way; a "real man" has so many concepts tied to that anger trigger, he can barely finish out a train of thought.

These days, I know a little bit more about my father. His name is Bob, he is Italian, olive skinned, dark-haired; the least he could have done was to give me his coloring. It seems he has a penchant for producing redheaded children in mothers like my own, who come from families of ubiquitous mousy browns. He initially tried to contest paternity on the grounds of our divergent coloring. As a result, I was one of the first cases (possibly the very first; I have yet to do the research) in which DNA testing was used to prove paternity for purposes of obtaining child support. A real milestone. When he made the trip from New Mexico back to PA for the paternity hearing, when I was two, he had two little red-haired girls and a ninety-nine point something-or-other genetic probability of being my father.

I still haven’t met the man, nor do I have any special plans to do so. I learned his identity from my mother over winter break, my sophomore year in college. It was January sixth, my mother’s boyfriend’s fortieth birthday, and he had been abducted by some friends while my mother was at work, dragged away to do some barhopping. My sisters were in bed, and mom and I were watching a movie. She had quite a collection of Stroh’s cans fanned out on the coffee table in front of her, and through one of those lovely drunken chains of free association, she ended up telling me for the first time who my father was. We kept it casual, chit-chatty, but I felt this odd crawling feeling in the back of my neck; so there it was. Bob. I’m Italian. That’s how I told my friends about it: "Turns out I’m Italian." Prior to this, I was a mutt, about equal parts Italian, Irish, German, Native American, and English (a common blend in my part of Pennsylvania), half blank. I’m still a mutt, I suppose, but now I have a full half. I still burn pretty easily in the sun. C’est la vie.

What kind of guy was Bob? Who knows. He might have been another macho man, or just a petty schmuck. Based on mother’s track record, I doubt he was all that admirable. One thing I do know: your father is something different from your mother’s husband (or significant other). Had it been my father whose favorite words were ‘bitch’ and ‘fuck,’ used in the loudest voice and most intricate constructs he could manage, would I have known him to be a deviant, or would I simply have followed along?

As it was, I was lucky enough to avoid having anyone make a man out of me. The chief element in my relationships with my mother’s others was that I didn’t care; I accepted her husband, I found ways to live with the other two, but I knew better than to emulate any of them. Because I had my distance from them, I could see their masculinity for what it was: a burden, a barrier. Strong gender identity is an American pathology, Conservatitis. Our country has more anxiety over issues of sexuality and gender than virtually any other industrial nation; we define ourselves in terms of overlapping suppressions.

I was poor growing up. Right now I am a National Merit Scholar and attend school for free. About the only thing I pay for is books. Had I devoted my life to emulating some father-figure’s indoctrinated masculinity, I would almost certainly be an unskilled worker back in Pennsylvania, a gas station attendant or bag-boy at the grocery, if I could get a job at all. In America, poor white males are told to be big dumb apes; it’s the easiest way to keep us poor. Sadly, I was among the ranks of children of single mothers who had no one to teach me this ideal.

There is a reason why conservatives are so concerned with the nuclear family: it keeps them empowered. It keeps the masses of America in check, men constructing their own traps and ensnaring not only themselves but also their wives and children. The traditional American household bolsters the hierarchies that drive our economy. Where would America be if lower-class men could not be bought at barely a living wage and women were not virtually enslaved?

Education yields androgyny. This is not to say that breasts wither and penises shrivel, just that education leads one away from the strictly regimented gender roles proscribed by our society. In my case, I got a head start.

It is time to recognize that the nuclear family is just one model; it’s not an ideal. People are individuals, and in a sense, groups are also individuals. That is to say, each family is unique; they may operate in a hierarchy or a democracy; they may have two active members or twenty. It’s not important. When it comes to creating healthy children and healthy relationships, what matters is the who, and not the what. An asshole is an asshole; he has a negative impact. It’s time for conservative America to wake up and realize, single motherhood is not inherently inferior to marriage. The fact is, a lot of those fathers who ran off and left us poor little bastards all alone just are not worth having back.