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Mystery shrouds the male contributor to my genetics. At least so far as I’m concerned. He was out of my life before I could have reliably picked him out of a line-up of two. Abusive, my mother informed me, when I was old enough to wonder about it. My mother’s track record for veracity being what it was, I had no reason to doubt her. I’ve gone back and forth throughout life over whether and how much this particular factoid matters — when I thought about it.

My mother went on to remarry twice after leaving my biological father. Her second husband (I’ll call him Howard) was a WW II veteran, hewing to the generally accepted hyper-masculine notion of what a man should be. He also believed children should be seen and not heard. My hyperactivity and communicativeness awakened his propensity for violence early and often. I was thirteen when my mother finally had enough and cordially invited him to leave and not return. The scars — physical and otherwise — have faded with time.

I did not see my mother’s third husband coming. I’ll call him Ben. I was fourteen at the time. So, if you’re doing the math then, yeah. Ben crossed my radar — unexpectedly — less than a year after Howard left with the contents of a single suitcase. My mother and Ben married after the briefest of introductions to Ben’s family of five children. On Friday, I had one sister by adoption. By Sunday night, I had four sisters and two brothers. Let’s call it an adjustment — one I handled, I confess, with less than perfect grace.

Fast forward a lot of years and I find myself occasionally wondering how things might have been different if I’d had a consistent, present, and positive male role model. Would I have emerged better…or worse? Is it self-serving rationalization that most days, I tend to give my mother more than the benefit of the doubt? I tend to give her high marks for her strength and the perceptiveness to know what I needed most of the time and to be able to provide it.