It's My Life

He arrived on my doorstep after five hours of driving, and I was finally looking at him for the first time.
 My Dad.
I was unsure how I was feeling, and completely clueless about how I should be feeling, so I went with the politeness that had been drilled into me as a kid by my wonderful adoptive parents who raised me.
I invited him in, made him coffee, and we got to chatting.
Of course the first thing I did was stick my foot in my mouth, and bluntly came out with information he apparently hadn't known, and was a little shocked to hear.
"Good one, Tash!" I mentally kicked myself.
At one point during the conversation, he caught me staring at him, searching his face, and the tears began to fall before I could look away in time.
Gently, he asked what was wrong, and I told him I was upset because I didn't see any resemblance between him and myself.
I told him what my birth mother had informed me, that I could be the by-product of a one night stand with him, or the abuse she endured from her own father.
I told him I had been praying for a resemlance to him, in order not to have to face the other possibility, and now I wasn't sure either way.
He moved over to the couch where I was, held me until I had settled down and said that he had known about what she was going through at the time, my birth mother had confided in him.
He said that at the time, it had messed him up a bit too, as he was too young to know how he could help her. So after their brief relationship, he had moved to another city to look for work and lost contact with her.
The whole reason he was at my place, was to pick me up and take me to his home for a week, and introduce me to the rest of his family up there.
Once we'd taken the drive back to his place, it was close to midnight.
He showed me where I would be sleeping, and then gave me some photo albums he had dug out of his collection. In them, I saw his sisters, his mother and father, and a whole lot of resemblance to me.
My relief was incredible, and obviously written all over my face.
He hugged me, and said that as soon as he saw me, he had known I was his. I called him a bastard, and said that he could have bloody well told me instead of letting me stress on it for so many hours.
He laughed and asked if I would have believed him, and I admitted that I probably wouldn't have.
The next day, when I got a chance to talk to him alone, I asked him if we should get blood tests done to make sure.
He said that was up to me, but did I really want to find out it went the other way, or was I happy to assume I was his kid and leave it at that. He said whatever I decided, he would support, but recommended we just go with what we had and accept it was true.
Which we did, and still do to this day.

So is he to be or not to be my father? Officially I will never know, and quite frankly I don't want to know. But I never was one for officialdom and rules, so I will just say that he is to be.
This is a true story, and none of it has been embellished for the sake of creative license. It is my story, and I am now working on creating a movie with a colleague, about domestic violence and abuse, in order to excise the demons from both my past and his, and to raise awareness that the fallout of such crimes affects more than just the predator, and his victim. It affects future generations as well, which has been overlooked by the public and media for far too long.