I am a bastard. I don’t have a father. Let me explain, as much as I can. You see, I have never met my father nor do I know his name. What I do know is that my mother, for whatever reason, cannot tell me the truth. After her numerous and ever changing stories about this man’s identity, I realized this and stopped asking. In some ways, it is extremely sad. Many people do not know how to react when they discover this fact about me. For a while, I struggled with it myself but now I am grateful for the opportunity it has given me.

I am not a feminist (I have nothing against them, I’m just not very good at being dedicated to causes); yet, my lack of a father has helped me to understand just how constructed gender roles are. Although my mother spent more than a decade with her first husband, whom she married when I was still a  toddler, the most impressionable time of my life was one during which she was a single parent. She did it all: the cooking, the cleaning, the minimum wage job to support her child. There were no women’s roles or men’s roles. There were simply things that had to be done so she could pay the rent and put food on the table–and before she could sit down to enjoy that food, she had to make it.

So it should come as no surprise that I failed to see jobs as gender specific. During my high school years, I floated from career ideas. For a while I wanted to be a lawyer. Then an architect. The idea of an engineer even floated in my mind for a short time. Then a Web designer. These days I still entertain the thought of starting my own IT company, lack of formal education be damned. The trend, here, is that all of these jobs are typically performed by men but I rarely give that a second thought.

Nor do I apply gender to the tasks that must be completed in the home. My ex-husband certainly hated his lack of “manly” skills but, to me, putting together furniture or attaching hardware to walls was the same as washing dishes or putting away laundry. All of these tasks were simply related to the safety and comfort of my home and it didn’t matter who completed these tasks as long as they were completed. One day, when he struggled to remember the term for a pillow case, I stood flabbergasted, wondering just how someone could come from such a place where gender roles were so staunchly enforced that a young man would completely lack “home smarts”–street smarts of the home.

Instead of looking at men and women who fulfill their gender roles are more masculine or feminine, I simply gauge whether or not a person is efficient at life, capable of running their own home and rearing a family. Is this person someone who has common sense? Will this person stick around when the going gets rough? But the more important question is “Am I capable? Can I buckle down and get things done? Am I the only person I need to make it through life?” I like to think that I can answer “Yes” to these questions because I am a whole person capable of doing whatever it takes to survive. I am not restrained by gender roles or societal expectations nor do I force those same restraints on others. I am simply the girl without a father and, sometimes, all the better for it.