Thank you for writing about this experience - as it is one I have less experience about, I felt an opportunity to learn from and try to hold your experience. I relate it to people who have walked in and out of my life, and wonder if/where I have done the same. But I understand this poem is so much more than that - this is a relationship about someone who, by birth, should have been by your side, and has been, at best, a fleeting stranger/acquaintance. I worked with teenage girls for a long time, who often claimed they were "adults". I smiled at them, and told them they were not adults until they had to start dealing with adult problems. I have no idea how old you are. I bring up the adult problems idea because I felt your poem embodies that loss of innocence where child problems become adult ones in that your strong desire for a father had to become and has become a question about the fallibility of your father as a man. It is situation that has no easy answer, no 'right' way to go. As I have progressed into my twenties I feel like adult decisions are colored grey, because the world has lost it's black and whiteness. Thank you for this poem.