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So, this morning, I log into Facebook, and mixed between the 15 Farmville requests and myriad events I won’t attend, I had a friend request.

From my Dad’s first wife.

Let that one sink in for a minute. I’m almost 31 years old. My parents have been married for 32 years. We’re talking about 34 or so years ago was the last time she had any remote connection to me.

This happened back in 2005, too, with MySpace. Remember MySpace? Back then, she’d sent me a message and told me she saw me on another person’s page, and she knew when she saw my face that I was definitely Dad’s kid. I look exactly like my father’s mother, so, sure, not out of the realm of possibility. We traded a couple of messages, “Yes, I’m well, my family’s well, thanks, I work in Charleston, etc.” and then, it all faded away. It was just a blip on the radar and I never thought about it again, really.

Until this morning.

I didn’t know my father had a first wife until I was 15 years old. My parents weren’t the people who told me about her. It was a sweet old lady named Irene who worked with me at the Sno-Biz, and I remember how this went down like it happened this morning.

“Are you Bob’s daughter?” she asked me while she was elbow deep in a sink full of hot water to clean our bottles.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know him?” (As an aside, at some point in my life, asking people “Do you know him?” was about as common a question as “Do you like to eat dinner?” and “You breathe, right?”)

“Oh, sure I do,” she said. “I worked with your Daddy when he was at Corning, but that was when he was married to his first wife.”

At this hot nugget of knowledge, I felt the vomit in my throat. What? My father’s first wife? As in someone before my Mom? Wha? Why didn’t I know this? Why was this some proprietary knowledge that didn’t make it my way?

“Oh, yeah!” I said, with probably a little too much joy and definitely too much syrup. “Gosh, that really was forever ago.”

I mean, let me be honest … I’m dying on the inside. Not so much at the revelation that my father had a first wife, because, really, a whole lot of people have first wives, but because I wasn’t prepared for the situation. At 15 years of age, I was very proud of my ability to think on my feet like a grownup, and here I was, just wanting to curl into a ball like a kid and hide.

I got through the rest of my shift without incident, and by the time 6 p.m. rolled around, I’d gone through the stages of it — the shock turned into disbelief, the disbelief turned into anger and then, well, I was stuck on anger. (Those who know and love me know I get stuck on ‘anger’ quite a bit.) I bounded into our house and slammed the door, and in true high-school-dramatics fashion yelled, “Was anybody planning on ever telling me that my father had a first wife?!”

Crickets.

Finally, my Mom yells from the kitchen, “There weren’t any kids, it was a short marriage and it wasn’t important.”

“Oh, OK.”

My Mom has a better perspective on most things than I do. Maybe that’s something you acquire with age, practice and teenager raising, but the woman’s pretty unflappable.

But here, 15 years later, I’m faced with this sticky situation of how to respond to this Facebook friend request. It’s not so much a dilemma in whether I should accept it, it’s the dilemma of wanting to ask, “Why?”

Why is there some kind of vested interest in me? I’m not your kid. I don’t have any siblings who are. I mean, I’m not a douche. I’ve accepted friend requests from people I don’t know and people I actually don’t like, but this one sticks with me. There doesn’t seem to be policy guidelines for this, other than, “Eh, if your conscience says no, just don’t do it.”

Me, though. It would happen to me.

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