I had a falling out with my dad a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t do anything unusual to warrant it — he was just being himself. Accepting my dad for his (flawed as is all humanity including yours truly) self is something I’ve worked to do mostly with success. And in fact my freelancing struggles helped bring us closer because if anyone knows about cold-calling, networking and difficult clients, it’s my former insurance salesman dad.

But a number of things happened that just put me over the edge and I canceled the father’s day dinner I was going to cook him.

I’m not proud of this; it’s just true.

You know what it was, it’s that the Friedman Family reunion was just about to happen and I couldn’t go (neither could my sister). (It happened this past weekend.) And it made me think of all the visits my little sister’s have gotten back there courtesy of my dad and how he never flew us (myself and my full siblings) out there. How my big sister missed my grandfather’s funeral and how much this still devastates her. I can’t help it — it makes me feel like the forgotten post-divorce kid again. Apparently I’ve got an inner 12-year old who holds grudges.

I’ve always identified with the Friedman side of my family because I am a Friedman (in name) and because I look like a Friedman (in stoutness). Also I more strongly identify with my Jewish heritage, which is my dad’s side of the family. Finally we lived in California for awhile, where much of the Friedman family lives, and so when I was a kid for three halcyon years, we felt very Friedman-ish.

But once we left California and once my grandparents died, we had no real contact with that Friedman side. None. My dad’s brother came out a couple of times but the extended family? No contact. This was before the internet age, of course, and casual relationships were harder to maintain.

In my late teens, the whole Friedman family mystique kind of took hold. It’s when I took (and failed) Russian. It’s when I first started thinking about identifying as Jewish and learning more about Judaism. It’s when I knew I’d never change my last name if I got married. It’s also (early college) when I quit talking to my dad. Coincidence? I think not.

I had this idea that there was some place I belonged without question and that when I found this place my life would start to make sense. I was eighteen, searching for myself and desperately seeking guidance on the journey. And like many kids my age, I was looking for those answers in my family tree.

So I was/am miserable about missing the Friedman family reunion not just because it reminds me of how much I don’t have as far as those extended family ties but also because I realized I had this very quiet, very childish inner dream that they were all missing ME like I was missing THEM. Like they were all sitting around going, “There’s a place in our heart that is just so Dawn-shaped but where is Dawn?”

It’s funny how those childish dreams just keep on powering our emotions even when we’re not aware of them.

But what made me identify this was thinking about how adoptees in reunion are sometimes disappointed and I thought about how family ties can matter to us in a way that is different than how they play out practically and what would I tell an adoptee who was trying to find herself in old photographs and failing as often as she’s succeeding? I would tell her — they’re your family no matter what and you can take what you need but you also have to accept the limits of the reality of your relationships. Which is what I’m working on for myself. (And as an aside, I am of course thinking about Madison and her family ties and her losses and feeling grateful — dare I say it — for this hard-earned empathy so I can help her if her struggles are similar.)

I told my sister (my full sister, Erica, who is also pretty devastated about Friedman family reunions that don’t seem to miss us as much as we miss them) that I was going to try disengaging my fantasy. I was going to try interrupting it. I was going to try to say, “Yes, that’s where I got my Russian peasant physique but it’s not where I’m going to find all of my answers.”

I wondered to myself, why so much with the Friedmans? What about my mom’s side of the family, which is rife with passionate, smart, hard-working heroines and which has been so much more welcoming and so much more available? And the answer is — because my mom was there; I didn’t have to yearn for her. I could take her (and her ancestors) for granted. They were already mine. But the Friedmans — I lost them when I lost my dad.

I will always have lost my dad. I can’t help that. Even he can’t help that. We can’t fix the way back when. I can, however, heal some of the hurts by adjusting my point of view and letting go of daydreams I didn’t know I was holding onto. Only I’m not so hot at it right this very minute so I’m still not up to calling my dad. (Especially because he is totally impatient with this stuff — I think it’s the guilt, which he covers with exasperation because I do think he feels guilty and really, he ought to although I’m not sure if it does any of us much good. I’m just still mad enough to want him to feel lousy, too.)

Who knew that growing up could be so painful four decades into this living thing???