Could you imagine going your whole life never knowing your father, and then one day BOOM, “meet your dad”? Would the experience live up to expectations? Would he look like you? Sound like you? Act like you? Hell, would he even like you?
This year, singer Keyshia Cole lived this exciting yet fearful reality. At 34 years of age and after a long quest to find her biological father, she finally discovered her dad, who turned out to be famous boxing trainer Virgil Hunter. While the signer’s surreal reunion reminds us of life’s poetic destinies, it’s actually not that rare of a story.
Meet BMWK reader LaVonna Thomas-Jones.
At 27, LaVonna didn’t know her father. All her life, she had been told her biological father was likely another man but there were always rumbles that it might be yet another man.
“I never really gave the issue any thought because, at the time, I was so used to it being my mother, my brother, my sister and myself,” says LaVonna. “Eventually, my siblings and I were taken from my mother and placed in foster care.”
LaVonna admits her childhood was rough. She moved out of foster care and was eventually adopted; but even then, she recognizes her upbringing was not the happy-go-lucky childhood that many of her peers experienced.
Meanwhile as she struggled, her father Stanley Harris never knew she even existed. Not knowing this tie, he moved to North Carolina to Atlanta. But when he moved back to North Carolina in 2011, he began hearing rumors around the town that he had a daughter. He followed up on the rumors, seeking out LaVonna’s mother. She confirmed the rumors were true; he did indeed have a daughter; and the two would meet for the first time that night.
But would the occasion be everything LaVonna had hoped for and Stanley could have ever anticipated?
“Everything fell right into place with my dad and I. In fact, the same day I met him he was calling me that evening to tell me to make sure I leave the cancer walk I was at before it got dark,” she recalls. “My current relationship with my father is amazing. Most days, I don’t know what I would do without him. We talk and text throughout the day. If I go a day without calling/texting him; he’s calling [jokingly] threatening to ‘whip me.’ Every Saturday, we have some reason to hang with each other.”
With that union restored, she was even able to develop a great relationship with his family, including her aunt, who also without missing a beat stepped into the motherly-auntie role.
LaVonna, now 32, and Stanley, 52, have built a great friendship and loving father-daughter relationship, which no one could ever imagine was only cultivated five years ago. And for anyone who doesn’t know their parents and who doesn’t think their story could end in a happy ending like hers, LaVonna wants to tell them that they should never close the chapter of a book still in progress.
“Please always sit and listen to both sides of a story. Forgive and forget! Don’t miss out on developing a relationship with your parent because, at the end of the day, you only get one mother and father,” she says. “I believe every parent deserves to have a relationship with their child/children. So even if you’re just meeting your parent/parents much later in life, please give them that opportunity. ”
BMWK, tell us your favorite memory—whether recent or old—with your father?