I never told my father when I finally finished my conversion to Judaism. He knew I was converting, mind you, but I knew - everyone knew - that he might be an embarrassment if he attended the ceremony. He would put on an unpleasant face for those there, those who cared. I privately wondered about the sincerity of his own faith, after all, how many devout fundamentalists act the way my father does, miss as much church as my father does?

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His own religion lost some of its luster (although I had already left it) when his second wife left him. That he didn't take his wife's leaving well turned out to be something of an understatement. At one point I said, “But you still have my sister and me.” Dad replied, “It’s not the same.”

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His wife had been adopted and she had finally met her biological father. But her biological father didn’t like dad and convinced her to file for a divorce. At first Dad was only sad and I felt bad for him. However, after a few months he became angry. He contested the divorce, claiming my stepmother was too unstable to make the decision. I think he even believed it himself, but my sister assured me that he’d made this up. He then enlisted the aid of his church to help him get her back, going to each fundamentalist church in Lawrence, Kansas begging for prayers for her return. And he said her father was going to hell for supporting the divorce. He told strangers in the grocery stores. He spoke of nothing else at either my grandmother’s funeral - even claiming her leaving caused Grandma’s death - or my cousin’s funeral a few years later.

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And then there’s the fact that he mysteriously discovered his faith after seventeen years of refusing to go to church with my mom. And when he did go his main interest didn’t seem to be church, it seemed to be in winning Mom back. Later he blamed my conversion on my mother and her Methodist ways.

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So, perhaps I should feel grateful that my conversion matters to him so little, especially in light of how he acts when things matter to him a lot.

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Now when I go to see him, we have nothing to talk about. His politics have moved to the right; he watches Lou Dobbs on CNN and has completely brainwashed himself. He speaks disparagingly of China and Mexico. He comments to strangers about the “funny laws” I have to keep as a religious Jew and often forgets that I am a vegetarian. He sometimes hints that Barak Obama is a Muslim or that Lincoln had African ancestry. Of course, he always laughs at my other Grandma’s jokes about Jews and Catholics.

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What happened to the man I thought I knew as a child? Did he ever exist? I remember when my Mom left him when I was four, I wanted to stay. Where’s that father? Where’s the father who spoiled me, who bought toys, who paid child support? The father I later talked to about politics, religion and music. Where’d that father go?

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Somewhere along the road of me growing up, he turned into another father, the father who came to see me during my first hospitalization for Depression at age thirteen and said, “I’m probably the reason you’re here.”

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor