Ready To Become the Father

I Want To Be

Kevin Barhydt is a YouTube creator, and the author of the memoir Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after many years of recovery, Kevin began a painful journey to uncover his origins, and the hopeful search for his mother. His book, “Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother”, chronicles the unfolding of these stories. The interwoven perspectives offer an unflinching look at the myriad ways life can cloak us in darkness and helplessness yet still resonate with joy and recovery.

Kevin Barhydt’s life is summed up with these eight words: to be of service to God and others. His YouTube channel creates a safe space for survivors of addiction, abandonment, adoption and child sexual abuse, and to explore the healing process. As a YouTube creator, author, actor and educator – as a son, husband, father and friend – he gives of himself with one expectation: that you can only keep what you have by giving it away.

“I cried for her as if crying for God to be with me, to know someone who can never be known, someone who is known by their absolute absence.”

(— Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother)

The substance of who I am is known to me through the primal connection to the mother I’ve never met. When the sun rises in the morning I remember that it is her life that gave me life, her blood and breath. I am here because of her. She is gone, yet always with me, in me.

Not so, my father.

If my birth mother seemed ethereal, my biological father was abstract. My adoptive father was present, yet physical and mental illness limited his strength, and reduced my confidence in him. My perspective of a father became peripheral and unclear, and that lack of clarity turned into a path of loose gravel for me to walk upon. As I became a father and grandfather, I always seemed unsteady. The ground beneath me could not support my aspirations as a man.

During the pandemic I made the choice to search for my biological father. I only dimly sensed the risks, as I spit in a tube and sent it off with my local postal worker to some Ansestry.com lab. When the results returned I discovered that my biological father was likely one of two brothers, one alive, the other deceased. My hopes soared. Then, of course, came the hard part of attempting contact. I had gone through the very same process only fourteen years prior when searching for my birth mother, finding clues, and completing my search, only to find a grave. When I discovered my mother I also found two brothers and a sister. Now, as had happened then, my first hope for connection would be with my possible siblings. 

Each refused to speak or correspond in any way. With every rejection I felt the pain of abandonment all over again. My search ended without any contact or confirmation. As the days turned to months, I grieved, then slowly found the path to acceptance. I strove for peace knowing I’d already found so much happiness with my maternal siblings. I looked for contentment with the effort I had poured into searching for my paternal family. As I continued walking toward a future in which I would never know my father, I found that though I felt stronger and more confident, there was something missing. My own path of fatherhood that I was attempting to walk upon was still full of loose gravel.

When my mother relinquished me, I had lost my mother. In searching for her my purpose was to get her back. I needed to find my mother. I needed my mother to be un-lost. However, in searching for my father, I realized that I didn’t need to get him back. I wasn’t looking to find him. He wasn’t lost. He simply ‘was not’. 

The father I was searching for wasn’t a father, or more precisely wasn’t a man at all. Instead what I needed, and had been missing even with my adoptive father present, was an answer to the questions I had never had the courage to ask. What kind of man did I want to be? What kind of father? Husband? Friend? What kind of brother? What kind of son?

My mother will always be the powerful rays of sun that give me life and breath. A father has never been that for me. Now my desire has manifested instead in a quest for a vision of the kind of father I want to be. I know now that no man will ever give me that vision. It instead is dependent on my ability to imagine the unimaginable: that I, with or without a father, can and will become the best father that I can be. The best man. The best me.

My adoptive father died ten years ago, and I miss him beyond all measure. My biological father may be dead, or simply lost to me forever, and I mourn and grieve his absence. Yet today, as I sit for dinner with my son, and listen to his brother wish me Happy Father’s Day on the phone, I magically sense the gravel beneath my feet holding me higher. More steady. Ready for me to take the next step forward. 

Ready for me to become the father I want to be.

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