Steve Jobs refused to meet his biological father…
…Syrian-born Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, because his father had bragged that he’d met Jobs in his restaurant, and that Jobs was a good tipper.
This things were apparently not untrue, mind you: the two men apparently had met briefly in the father’s restaurant, which Jobs had patronized a couple of times, and had shaken hands. And, although no information is given one way or the other about it, it’s probably also the case that Jobs was a good tipper.
When all of this happened, Jandali had no idea Jobs was his biological son. Here’s the fuller story:
When I heard the tape, I wondered from whom Jobs had heard that “little bit” that he didn’t like about Jandali. Was it from a report by the man’s ex-wife, Jobs’s biological mother? She may be a wonderful person in all other respects, but no ex-wife should be the most trusted person to report fairly on her ex-husband (and I say that as an ex-wife, and I think I’m ultra-fair). Or did Jobs learn about his biological father from Mona Simpson, Jobs’s sister, who seem to have had her own issues with a father she only knew as a very young child (after their parents had gotten married and before their divorce when she was four)?
I know nothing about what sort of a person Jandali really is; he may be every bit as abominable as Jobs seems to have thought he was, and more. But I also know that these divorces stories are not always what they seem. When a father drifts away and is heard from no more, sometimes it is indeed abandonment by that father. But sometimes the mother has kept him away by being uncooperative about his visitation right, or even by dropping out of sight herself with the child and and becoming somewhat difficult to find (especially in those pre-Google days of Jobs’s youth). IMHO, unless a biological parent is a criminal and/or psychopath, if a child decides to search it’s probably a good idea to get information from the horse’s mouth rather than secondhand.
Jandali’s crime of wanting to impress Simpson, his long-lost daughter, with the fact that he was once a big shot who knew Steve Jobs is hardly the sort of thing that one would think would be judged so very harshly. We all have our flaws, and a father or mother is often an imperfect creature, full of the minor foibles common to humanity, such as looking back on a glory time and saying “I used to be somebody!” An adoptive child in particular can face a powerful dilemma when deciding whether or not to search for, and then to talk or meet with, a biological parent who has given him or her up. The parent is usually unequal to the task of being perfect or anywhere near it. And although the child is absolutely not required to forgive, it would be nice if the child gave the parent the chance to tell his or her own story at last before making that judgment.
[NOTE: Here’s a WSJ piece about Jandali.]
And Allan Turing had a niece who was something of a flibertygibbet who placed her valise in the left luggage at Paddington Station never realizing her baby, the future Steve Jobs, had crawled in and fallen fast asleep.
Little Steve, upon awakening, crawled out of the valise and fell right off the ledge into a tear in a garment bag belonging to Mr. Kim Philby, who took the bag to Turkey, where he left it because he didn’t have room for in on the saddle of the mule he rode over the border to the U.S.S.R.
So far so good?
In my dotage I have a lot more sympathy for estranged fathers (no personal ax to grind here, either as father or son) because I suspect it is generally impossible for an outsider to fathom the power and complexity of the emotions that might be involved.
For example, my father died several years ago, and I’ve only been back to his grave once. Cold, unfeeling son? Quite the contrary, but I’ve only been able to bring myself to go that one time so far, and that left me upset and deeply depressed for days afterward. I miss him, and think about him every day, but something about visiting his grave is exquisitely and profoundly painful, and I find it hard to do.
I could easily imagine a similar dynamic in estranged fathers. Marginalized from his child(ren)’s life/lives, perhaps through no or little fault of his own, meeting them awkwardly as a semi-stranger a reminder of a painful time in his life, the passage of time and his own mortality, and what he missed while they were growing up. Yeah, I could see how that meeting might be difficult to bring about.
So I’m reluctant to judge others’ actions in these kinds of situations.
This story stirs emotions of abandonment and how it feels. Maybe somewhat like Jobs felt about his father. It’s complicated. My father’s father (my paternal grandfather) deserted his family. My father refused to even mention his name. He had nothnig but hatred for him. But he left his family (my mother and brothers) and became a distant parent with little contact. There was, in my mind, hope for a relationship someday. When he was killed in an accident when I was 18; he was gone forever. I knew then we would never have a relationship. It was irrational but it felt like a total abandonment. I blamed him. Took a long time to work through that.
Jobs must have felt the same in some way. As if he was abandoned by his father. Those ties, even when they are not close, still can be felt in the core. Do men expect more from the relationship with their fathers? Do they expect their fathers to be better than they are? IMO, yes. It is hard to let go of the disappoinment, the sense of loss, the abandonment. Jobs may never have let go of it, but now it’s too late.
From what I have read, the parents of Steve’s mother were opposed to the marriage, which made giving Steve-Jobs-to-be up for adoption an option, and not necessarily a dishonorable one. Life often comes with difficult choices, with the better choice often being the less bad one.
I am in no position to either judge Steve Jobs for his attitude towards his biological father, nor to judge his biological parents for giving him up for adoption.
One time when I was a young child I asked my parents if I were adopted. They said I was not, and that was that. My question was out of curiosity, not from a feeling that there was something awry.
Interracial adoptions can be problematic, as the majority parents often do not know how to instruct their minority children how to respond when others treat them not as a person, but as a member of a minority group. When the child leaves the bubble of the adopted family and the hometown, the issue of how to respond to being treated as a member of a minority may come up for the first time. Without prior instruction in this situation, the response may be difficult. I know of two such examples where the response resulted in 1) prison for a Black adopted by white professionals and 2) suicide for an Oriental also adopted by white professionals- not the same family.
Fortunately, that was not an issue for Steve Jobs.
Steve Job’s accomplishments do not lend support to those who prefer abortion to adoption.
Steve Jobs was given up for adoption by his unmarried parents, who later married and had a daughter, whom they kept.
Seems like that might rankle.
Steve Jobs’ birth parents didn’t abort him. That takes love and courage.
I second Occam’s Beard’s emotion.
This story stirs emotions of abandonment and how it feels. Maybe somewhat like Jobs felt about his father. It’s complicated. My father’s father (my paternal grandfather) deserted his family. My father refused to even mention his name. He had nothnig but hatred for him.
My father had had the same experience, and had the same reaction.
Not to be crass, or wishing to sully this thread with a partisan tenor, but there is of course another personage whose family history is not light years removed from that of Jobs. One has to wonder about the psychic impact of that abandonment, for such it clearly was.
OB: “……but there is of course another personage whose family history is not light years removed from that of Jobs. One has to wonder about the psychic impact of that abandonment, for such it clearly was.”
Yep! I have intuited that this has always been a huge isssue for Obama. It may be the psychic scar that has defined a good part of his life.
I have a slightly different take on this. My parents were divorced before I was born. I’ve never known my father or his family. And, I’ve never had any desire to know them. It drives some of my friends nuts that I have so little curiosity about him. I had a great mother and my maternal grandparents were wonderful to me. I just have never had any desire to find out about him. From what I’ve read, Jobs had great adoptive parents. Maybe he felt that Paul Jobs was his real father and had no need to search out another. (And that would explain why Mona Simpson felt differently.)