‘I found my dad on Linkedin’
When Julie Buntin, author of this summer’s hottest book, Marlena, came across her father – who’d abandoned her as a child – online, she felt compelled to click and connect
THE TINY HEADSHOT had eyes like mine. It was the first in a line of faces that had recently viewed my grandmother’s Linkedin profile. I clicked on the image and there he was, writ in pixels, a man in his early fifties with the dark hair I did not get from my mother. This was maybe the tenth picture of him I’d ever seen – he looked absolutely normal, cheerful even, his face an uncanny echo of my own. A Midwestern sales manager for a company that processes payroll. In the Skills Summary box he called himself a leader. Reliable and results-oriented. A blue button asked if I would like to connect with this person, my father, the man who walked out on us when I was a baby. I clicked it.
I was 27, and believed I no longer cared what he thought of me, whether he thought of me at all. The emotional bruise of my father’s absence in my life that had so often driven me to do stupid, dangerous things as a teenage girl was now such a permanent ache that it barely hurt at all. Still, after I sent him the invitation, I slammed my laptop closed, as if I’d done something wrong. There was no way he’d accept – but what would he think when he saw the request?
He left when I was a little over a year old – my parents’ marriage was the rushed result of a positive pregnancy test (me!) and it fell apart after I arrived. My mother would later tell me that he’d pushed for an abortion. I saw him a couple of times after he left – I remember sitting on his lap in a car, the sun flashing brilliantly in the rearview mirror, and being five or six and wide awake in a big bed in an unfamiliar room. By the time I was 12, I hadn’t seen him in years. There were no phone calls, no birthday cards or letters in the mail. It sounds dramatic, but as a kid, it wasn’t, not really. My mother did a good job of explaining his
absence as a fact rather than a shameful secret, and it’s hard to miss something that was never really there to begin with. My half-siblings didn’t have a father either – theirs passed away when we were all very little – and so it seemed entirely normal that my dad should be a mystery, an incomplete sentence.
But as I grew older, the mystery started to haunt me. Who was he? And how could I ever make sense of my own identity without knowing his? I filled notebooks with angsty questions like these. I was a fanatic reader with an active imagination, and for an embarrassingly long time I entertained the fantasy that he was Batman, and that he had left me because he was busy saving the world. Our first home computer coincided with my adolescence – I was 12 when we got the huge desktop, which connected to the internet via a series of telephonic dings. It was the year 1999, and the first thing I typed into Ask Jeeves was my father’s name. I didn’t find much. I’d repeat the search over and over throughout the years, as the internet multiplied, trying MSN, and then Google, finding public address listings, other men with my dad’s name, pages and pages of false leads.
Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, I was lost. The bookish kid who relied on stories to make sense of the world was replaced by a self-destructive and angry girl, in many ways a walking statistic for the plight of the fatherless – I lost my virginity at 14, to a boy a few years my senior, and ricocheted through a series of boyfriends. It’s such a cliché, that search for the obvious. My mother had remarried after my first stepfather died, and my second stepfather had three kids of his own – on top of my half-siblings, that made seven children in the house, and I got away with pretty much anything. I had no sense of the future – in all honesty, I didn’t consider myself of much value to the world, to anyone, and now, a few months away from my 30th birthday, I can see how much my dad’s absence had to do with my low self-esteem. When I pestered my mum with questions, she snapped that he was an asshole, that she couldn’t understand anything he did (how those questions must have hurt her, with their implication that she wasn’t enough). I wondered what horrible things were lurking in my personality, if I would grow up to be cold too, incapable, as my mother said he was, of love.
One night the summer after I fifinished secondary school, home late from a party, feeling maudlin, probably drunk, I booted up that old computer and searched for him again. Deep in the warren of results, I found a group photo in the archives of a website for an all boys summer camp in Vermont. My dad, I thought, was the camp counsellor in the middle – tall, flfloppy-haired, goofy smile. I saw myself in the way he squinted into the camera. I must have visited that website a thousand times. He was just a teenager. It shocked me how much and how little we had to do with each other – this archived photo of a boy almost exactly my age, without whom I wouldn’t exist. Even in college, when I’d grown used to using his absence as evidence of my resilience, I sometimes revisited those old photos, searching them for insight into who he was.
Many, many years later, that boy, all grown up and successful in his career, would accept an invitation from his adult daughter to connect on Linkedin. I got the notification that he’d accepted my request a few weeks after I’d sent the invitation – either he’d waited to accept, or he didn’t check his notifications that often. That still fascinates me. But I never had further acknowledgement from him. For a while, I thought about sending him a message – inmail, it’s called, Linkedin’s email service, available only to first connections, which my father and I are. I could ask him why he waited so long to accept my request; I could ask where he’s been, what he thinks of my profile, if he’s ever googled me, looking for clues.
But I didn’t. I looked at his profile, hovered my cursor over the message section, I thought of all the things I wanted to say, all the things I could never know. I did not send a message. He still hasn’t either, even years on from accepting my invitation. Access to this new world of detail – his work history, his goals, the public language he uses to sell himself – has made the mystery of him both bigger and smaller at the same time. I spent most of my life trying to shuffle together a picture of him based on fragments I unearthed from the internet, but the pieces I’ve found don’t add up. Or maybe they do – maybe he is reliable, put together, an inspiring leader, and also a man who decided he couldn’t be a father.
And maybe that’s OK. Maybe this is all I will ever get – the knowledge that whoever I become has more to do with his absence than whatever glimpses I can find online. So much of my adulthood has been about coming to terms with the fact that answers are hard to come by, questions often answered by questions. I see his face in the list of people who have viewed my profile, and I wonder if he’s looking too, or if he just clicked my name by accident. We’re still connected. But it’s up to him to make the next move.