Father, I / Child, I

Parents become children to their grown children. — I thought it was going to be easier to welcome him, but it was rather easier to say goodbye.

I was living in Baltimore for two years when he came. This was the first time he visited me and not the other way around. Ultimately, it was his health state that brought him here after years of postponing and rescheduling. This 'condition' was what broke the pattern he had been following ever since I moved out from Mexico nine years ago to the United States. At this point, his ephemeral “soon[’s]” followed by his usual “maybe another time[’s]” were the only words I could possibly place my attention towards. I was tired of "if ['s]"; so it yielded quite an unbelievable moment when a flight itinerary slid through my email. The email read “Your next trip to Baltimore” — I had a foot behind when I opened it, but the origin city followed by the passengers' name contradicted my expectations.

As usual, I already had a month’s worth of days planned out when he sent it. According to my schedule, that week of his arrival would be an average week of work. — He did vaguely suggested it over one of our unusual video calls. I pretended to look over my calendar and carelessly agreed. — But now, the plan went as usual; a work-centered week that would culminate on a quiet and recharging weekend up at our friend's farm: dandelion’s gardens I couldn't miss more over a week of urbanities, and the company of peculiar things that made me feel warm and grounded, such as birds' singings, the smell of burnt wood, a wine stomach, and, primarily, my love: Dany. The thought of those things faded and slowly became obsolete after I opened that email. He was not to blame, but somehow the feeling you get when someone has crossed your boundaries still oozed into the back of my throat.

What would a good child do? I think there has always existed a space between how one personally wants to react to family peculiarities, and how the world’s standardized decor expects one to do so. According to the later expectations, I had to stop everything I was doing. Go pick him up at the airport, despite it was a working day's evening, and be at his disposal for as long as his stay lasted; To be quite honest, the nostalgic reunion didn’t excited me. In contrast, I was delighted when my mom came unannounced on the first Dia de Muertos I was spending alone; I also was feeling a thrill up my spine every mile I drove to meet up with my step-mom in New York City to keep her company. But my father was always the last one from the three to make an effort. And even so, the way things were falling into place, or the way he was making things fall into place, made it feel as a ‘had to’ rather than ‘want to’ from his perspective.

I called him to check the email was not a mistake or even a joke of very bad taste. His answers were surprised by my skepticism. Surprise that wouldn’t go expressed all the way: his voice was hiding something, and I mistook that with indifference, even disappointment. Suddenly his calls became shorter and shorter. No more business plan explanations, or debouching on his relations - almost as if he was a kid and I was an adult with more emotional advice, - they diminished from the weeks before that call, until the date of his arrival.

What was it, after one year here, three without seeing each other, six since I went visiting him, and twenty since we use to live in the same house, that he felt the urge to visit? That question wondered my head and came to countless conclusions, none of them worthy of following-up. Yet, the plotting kept me awake for days before his arrival. I was blinded thinking about that call, and how while the planning was taking place, never did he used the words “If that is okay with you” or even a polite confirmation. Anything would've done. But not even a question contained in the same standardized invisible world decor on family matters that apparently only I follow. Not even a simple “what do you think?” After almost forcing my hosting of his visit.

Back then I was moving from the college’s housing where I was earning an MA in Psychology to a place not so nearby to campus. I was finally cutting all the strings that still held me back from feeling immature, or ’unprepared.” I was moving with my partner, indeed. A lovely two-bedroom nearby a farmers market. This decision felt like an awakening step towards a direction that made the most sense to me, rather than the antiquated ideas of my father's: “playing it safe,” “growing individually to then meeting someone who can share it,” “being self-sufficient.” — Sometimes I wonder if the words my father use, when he preaches his life advice, are the same ones he uses to pitch his new-coming start-ups and mentor other young business people. The one thing he does extraordinarily well. "Fifty years in the market will teach you that." - He often says.

The one thing he loves doing but is tragically under-compensated. — It felt like a release. It felt liberating not to feel I was following the steps he had come up with; volatile, unstable, all covered with a voluptuous but misleading blanket to hide from responsibilities. It felt releasing mostly because of what it implied being the child of someone whom I would objectively diagnose with the narcissistic disorder. It could be genetic as far as I am concerned. I could be

psychologically compromised for living under his shadows. Raised by them as somewhat of a role model. Among all the other things this decision meant to me and my partner; sharing a space, committing to one another, even getting a cat, was now my way of having a big laugh in the face of all those predeterminations or, as I like to call them: ‘demons’ that had been chasing me since the aftermath of their divorce.

“It seems you are dealing with commitment issues” — the school psychotherapist had said just before I graduated secondary school, long before even considering the profession, but already quite fascinated by it. The diagnosis came just at that time when the crux of my bloodline’s toxicity was boiling past the point of a ‘rebellion phase’ and became alarming. I woke up the day of his arrival stuck thinking: “How the hell does someone in their mid ten’s could be dealing with commitment issues?” — I kept asking the same question through the shower, my over-easy eggs, and finally the harsh echo of my steps through the building’s reception, seeking for signs of my prone conundrum. I re-evaluated my friendships, the things that made me happy, and the moments that made me who I am today through the lens of a deeply disturbed child whose ground had been ripped off and whose actions were influenced by those of their parents. I didn’t stop wondering what such ‘commitment issues’ looked like back then until the taxi I called to pick up my dad arrived and the cheerful, seventy-something-year-old driver asked me why was I going to the airport without any luggage.

While staring at the city that we were partially leaving through the window, I denied that therapist’s words that had been tormenting me. I stared at the old man through the rearview mirror. In him, I was looking at a generation of antiquated procedures and biased research not only on psychoanalysis but in the scientific world overall. A part of my educated ego felt pleasure in doing so. Apart from me felt smarter, more aware, and better than the old school of academia.

I was doing it again! The same thing my father used to do when someone gave him advice whether medical or personal. I knew I had to let go of those thoughts, no matter how much a part of me enjoyed them — if not I would show myself no better than him. I specially allowed myself to let go of it when I realized it wasn’t not only a lot like my father to be skeptical about a

doctor’s opinion for the reason we think we are better, but it was even worse because he at least was charming, and I was just an introverted academic who lived most part of my life inside of my head. I ceased the thought, put things into context, and accepted the diagnosis that was given to me a decade ago as if it would make any difference now.

The driver had type BWI and I remembered the voice announcing twenty-four minutes for the arrival. Something about the car’s smell reminded me of that of my father’s when we used to drive from state to state, city to city during his and my mother’s drifting apart. I looked through the window and remembered all those endless, purposeless roads. There was a silence, a silence not common to my father’s upbeat personality. It was a grieving silence that was considered too much but did too little, nothing like the silence I was finding in this taxi cab. In the same way, those long journeys matched the time when I was mandated to attend weekly sessions with the school psychologist; it was four years later, during his utmost absence, that I remember writing in those stimulating sessions of experimental psychoanalyses during times of heavy drinking and mono: “How am I supposed to find love? Or following through anything, if everything I do is being uncommitted?” And finally, “What is the point of even carrying on in life without committing to anything? You more than anyone should answer this!” I was an angry soul then, trying to hold anyone and anything responsible but my own spoil. Sessions of screaming at the walls in a room full of deeply scarred strangers, unlike myself, gave me the right balance between liberation, unsettlement, and comfort. The comfort of pretending, even if just for a minute, to go back to those long drives and make my father reconsider.

“Are you going to pick up a lover, sir?” — the taxi driver asked in the middle of the silence. The moment was dazzling, I would never expect a taxi driver to understand the reason why “it not of your business” were the only words I could possibly utter to his question, whatever that was. I thought the response had come naturally, as an instinct to people misgendering me, but I could only know so much about my reasons back then. I could only take so much during the last minutes I had before confronting my father for years of invisibility and gaslighting.

For a child, deprivation of a “normal” or rather “standard” life, like the one we see on TV, is a parent’s most unforgivable sin, but no one talks about it. It is taboo. Impossible to anticipate

being a parent can be synonymous with such an illusory promise. If it is shameful to admit one’s distress to such privilege, can you imagine admitting it to your own children? — I don’t regret having attended those sessions where the photograph of its inventor, Osho, hangs at the entrance. But I regret having told him about them in a written letter that contained most, if not all of the thoughts my fervent and unapologetic hands wrote while covered in sweat and bearing foreign screams. The only thing that exercise did was allow me the freedom I thought I would never have. But I guess I did have it. I got lost thinking about his tears while he was reading them.

Tears and “I’m sorry [’s]” Needless to say, that was not the response I expected from him. Particularly back then. My hopes were on an elaborate and almost-polite conversation on how parents can be selfish, and how his narcissism had stained my life the way Rajneesh’s philosophy had told me it would go. Ironic, isn’t it?

In the taxi, after my fatal response to the driver, silence came, and my teeth were biting my inner lips, my jaw was already tired from pressing it together, and that ride had suddenly lifted from time and space. I still had three minutes according to the driver’s GPS and I knew I had to ease my mind before meeting him, or I could start things on the wrong foot.

We arrived, I stepped down and my heart was beating fast. A child again. Lost in the middle of a crowd, desperate to find a familiar face. I felt stupid, angry; how come he didn’t tell me where to find him? I was forty minutes late, enough to let his plane land, and go through customs. At that point, a more considerate father would’ve already found a wi-fi connection and texted me, but not him. I was unnerved. I asked around which gate the flight from Guadalajara was coming out from. Gate A29, and nothing. He wasn’t here. I thought something must have come up, another excuse awaited me; maybe he had stayed in Mexico because of blah, blah, blah. Excuses. I traced back by steps back to the airport’s entrance.

When I saw him, he was about to get inside another cab. I tapped his shoulder and his eyes watered. What began breaking a few minutes before completely shattered at that moment. I felt weak. Nothing I was piling, simmering at the back of my head during the past few days, hours, minutes made any sense now. His warm and contagious laugh embraced me stronger than his arms, and his scent from the same perfume he has been using since I was a child, filled my

nostrils and swept my body out of any resentment. At that moment I realized I was disappointed and hurt at the idea of him, but I couldn’t possibly be disappointed in his colorful physical self. He looked at least twenty years younger, his facial expressions matched his charisma, an upbeat attitude that gave the illusion life was a dance, a dance I was starting to get the rhythm of. A dance I shamed him for. Shamed for not looking like other dances in the room; It filled me with remorse thinking I was eager to make his life harder. How petty of me.

I thought while I stared at him sleeping on the other side of the cab, how hard and lonely he must have felt. At that moment I saw his magic trick all along was really on the art of hiding, not himself, but the weight. Nobody around him ever knew about the pains and losses of being an unprepared father. Of being a role model in the age of loans called ‘investments,’ and billions of people following the same dream, dreams treated and traded as currency. Being a parent meant he was allowed to build an illusion based on aspirations and dreams that were planted in his head by someone, something else. Never meant to be fulfilled. I like to believe he meant good.