Adding My Father to My Birth Certificate

I’m 32 years old, and I’m legally going to have a dad.

Photo by Melvin Thambi on Unsplash

I’ve known who my biological father is for a long time. When I was born, my parents were teenagers. I was briefly in foster care. While they didn’t get married, they eventually got together, and they stayed together until I went to college. They often talked about fixing my birth certificate and changing my last name, but it never seemed to happen.

It was a thorn in my side throughout my entire childhood — doctor visits, school pickups, travel — all made just a little more complicated by the fact that my dad was not legally my dad.

“How does it feel to be a bastard?” a friend jokingly asked me.

“It’s okay. Jesus was a bastard,” I said. It was a line I had heard from one of my aunts. She told me not to let anyone get me down about how I was born; and her solution was to be as crass as possible. Over the years, I came to use it, almost reflexively, when I felt like someone was judging how I came to be on this earth, like the sperm of a married individual was any different from any other.

I knew it offended people, but I didn’t understand why. Plenty of people were born out of wedlock. Jesus also befriended prostitutes and lepers. Everything about him was done the “wrong” way. That was…