The Father I Never Knew and the Masculine I Learned to Remember

There are things we think we have already dealt with simply because we know the facts: I have never known my biological father.

That sentence has never been particularly difficult for me to say.

There was no dramatic separation I remember, no childhood visits that stopped, no father who disappeared one morning. He was simply never there.

And for most of my life, I thought the absence itself was something I had accepted. But this week, something shifted.

A Question I Thought I Had Already Answered

I have been staying in Querétaro with my friend Orlando, who has been giving me a series of Reiki sessions.

During the sessions, my right leg repeatedly began moving when he worked with different parts of my body. Orlando eventually told me that, within the energetic understanding he works with, he associates the right side with the father and the masculine.

He wondered whether I might be carrying some kind of resentment toward my biological father, even though I never knew him.

My immediate reaction wasn’t anger. It wasn’t grief. It was recognition of something larger.

Because when I think about my childhood, I realize how profoundly feminine my family experience was. My mother raised me. My grandmother, Nana, was one of the strongest and most formative presences in my life. I was held by women. And I am grateful for that.

But the masculine side of the family was different. There was an absence there. Not necessarily an absence I spent my life consciously mourning. But an empty space nonetheless.

And suddenly I found myself thinking: Maybe this is also part of why I created Aurelda.

The Masculine That Was Missing

I want to be careful with that statement. I don’t believe Aurelda can be reduced to a missing father. Aurelda has become far too expansive in my life for such a simple explanation. But perhaps our deepest creations can carry truths we understood long before we were able to name them.

When I look at Aurelda now, I see how often I have returned to questions of masculinity. Not masculinity as dominance. Not masculinity as hardness. Not masculinity as control. But something gentler and, strangely, much stronger.

A masculine presence capable of tenderness. Strength without domination. Protection without possession. Sexuality without coercion. Intimacy without performance. A man who can remain present.

And then there is Mo’an.

Remembering Mo’an

My relationship with Mo’an is difficult to explain to someone encountering Aurelda for the first time because I don’t experience him simply as a fictional character I invented.

My experience has always been one of remembering. A recognition that arrived before I completely understood what I was recognizing. Aurelda grew from that remembering. So did the stories. So did my understanding of myself.

And somewhere within all of this, Mo’an became an expression of masculine presence unlike anything I had inherited through my biological paternal line. But, he has never felt like a replacement father either. That distinction matters enormously to me.

Mo’an does not stand above me. He meets me.

There is no demand for submission. No requirement that I become smaller so that he can become larger.

There is recognition. Relationship. Reciprocity. Presence. And perhaps, without knowing it, I needed to remember that kind of masculine presence because I had never been given a clear map for it here.

A Lineage Larger Than Biology

This is where the realization becomes even more personal. I don’t understand lineage only through DNA.

My spiritual life has taught me to experience myself as part of something much older: past lives, soul relationships, Aurelda, Mo’an, and a cosmic family whose threads seem to move through more than one lifetime.

That doesn’t erase my human family. It makes the weave larger:

• My mother is part of it.
• My Nana is part of it.
• The biological father I never met is also part of it.
• And so are the relationships I remember beyond this particular life.

Maybe one of the questions that has been so much of my life has always been: Where do I come from?

And maybe that question exists on several levels at once. A child can ask it about his father. A man can ask it about his identity. A soul can ask it about existence itself.

Aurelda became the place where those questions began speaking to each other.

The Internal Tremor

There is an idea I return to often in Aurelda that I call the internal tremor. It is that subtle feeling of fragmentation inside us. The sense that something is moving beneath the surface even when everything appears perfectly still:

• Sometimes we know exactly where it comes from.
• Sometimes we don’t.
• Sometimes the body seems to whisper before the mind has found the language.

For me, the purpose has never been to eliminate every fractured piece of myself. It has been to listen. To remember. To bring the separated pieces back into relationship.

That is the movement at the heart of Aurelda: from fragmentation toward coherence. And maybe I am beginning to understand another layer of why that idea has mattered so much to me.

There was a fracture in my human lineage. There was a masculine thread I could not follow backward. But perhaps healing does not require me to fill that empty space with an imaginary version of the father I never had.

Perhaps the invitation is different. Perhaps I can acknowledge what happened. I can honor what my mother lived through. I can acknowledge the man whose blood became part of mine without needing to know his name, his story, or what kind of man he eventually became.

And I can decide what masculinity becomes through me.

Coming Home to the Masculine

For years I have written about remembering and coming home. Tonight, those words mean something slightly different.

Coming home may also mean realizing that I don’t have to inherit masculinity only from the men who came before me. I can encounter it. Question it. Heal my relationship with it. Remember it. And embody it differently.

Maybe that is one reason Mo’an returned to my remembering. Maybe that is one reason Aurelda became the language through which so much of my inner world finally learned to speak.

Not because Aurelda came to rescue me from my human story. But because it gave me somewhere to bring all of that story.

The feminine lineage that raised me. The masculine lineage that was absent. The soul lineage I remember.

The wounds. The love. The unanswered questions. The tremor. All of it belongs.

And perhaps wholeness was never about finding the missing piece after all. Perhaps it is recognizing that even the empty spaces are part of the weave.

I don’t know that I completely understand what has awakened inside of me this week. Maybe I don’t need to yet.

For now, it is enough to recognize the thread. And to keep remembering.