Sunday #16: Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

I wrote to Mom on Mother's Day, so it is only fair that I write to you on Father's Day. But the thing is, I have never had much interest in being fair, since fairness has never had much interest in me. "Fairness is not a planet we live on", I am often telling my clients. There is no inherent justice, only cause and effect--the natural world and the laws of physics. 

This is why I find family relations so intriguing, perplexing, and mysterious, because they don't seem to follow these laws. On the contrary, they are often a big sloppy mess. While it would be great if family could be easy peasy all the time, I do suspect that this would be somewhat boring. 

I also suspect, Dad, that your family life was rarely easy peasy for you. It could have been at times, but you were unfortunately "blessed" to have a physically abusive father and a complicit mother (which is what most mothers were back in those days). This does not mean that they were bad people, just that they were probably bad parents. But who has good parents all the time? 

You learned to be a man from your father, from the streets, from your schoolmates, and from popular culture of the day. Boy, did  you master the role. When it comes to "being a man", you hit every checkbox: athlete, charm, looks, intelligence, and strength. Too bad there was no checkbox for "sensitivity", because you had that in spades, and I suspect that you passed it onto me (thank you!). But in Mexican families in the 1940's and 50's, you could not be sensitive and be a man, and so despite your early success at being masculine, you were ultimately doomed due to the abuse you suffered and the emerging culture's intolerance of brutish machismo. 

I suppose you could have made it easy for yourself by marrying a brown woman and carrying on the family legacy from within a cultural bubble (like some of my aunts and uncles did). Actually, I think you did do that before you met Mom, didn't you? But by the time I showed up, you had taken the risk of marrying a white woman--the whitest of white women, and that is where the conflict grew, I suspect. 

On one hand, my mother and you were a divine match--both full of life and experience, ready to step outside the lines of your conditioned upbringings and write new legacies, and for a while, that is exactly what you did. You were a real-life Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, and you raised a family that did not exactly look like the one you grew up in. When I visit my cousins in San Diego, I am always aware that I am one of the only ones who does not speak Spanish, I am one of the only ones who does not look like a Mexican. 

I wonder sometimes, what were you thinking? 

Your wife, who was also my mother, came from a culture where men acted out a different kind of machismo from what you learned--white men practiced dominance subversively in their families, exerting control through financial power; Mexican men practiced it more overtly, using violence. Mind you, both forms are destructive to both the receiver AND the giver. What a joke. 

Your marriage to my mother did not allow for your culture's brand of dominance per se, and when you realized that she had given birth to a gay son, I suspect that your last brown phallic tower collapsed. That could have been a good thing, but it did not go that way, not due to any flaw in your character, but because your worldview had no room for variance. 

So you had to escape. 

You escaped the unfamiliar, you escaped grief, you escaped age, you escaped your family. 

I had to escape too, Dad, but the difference between you and me is that I had a place and people to escape to, while you only had a bottle. One of my greatest regrets is that I did not know how to invite your brand of masculinity into my brand, how to ask you to show me what you knew, while showing you what I knew. What a pair we would have made! I say this because I have both your strength and your sensitivity, but I nurtured the latter before the former, ensuring that I would suffer before I would thrive. 

***

I miss you, Dad. You have been dead for so long that my life has become a story where your role has faded into my past. But like Samantha in Sex and the City, your influence lives on even though you are gone. Because believe it or not, I watched you while I was growing up. While I was not always sure of what I was seeing, I knew that it was important to take notes. What I observed was what it looked like for a man to be in conflict with himself and the world. And what you showed me was the cost of losing that conflict. 

This Father's Day, there is no way for you to know how your life, and your losses, have continued to shape my life--the choices I make, the way I show up in relationship, how I choose to be a man, how I define winning and losing. I would like to think that I am finishing what you never got a chance to finish: a legacy separated from the violent dominance you were taught as a boy, a legacy that integrates protection and nurturing, strength and softness, tears and laughter, loudness with silence. 

If you were still alive, I might not ask you to teach me how to wrestle, because, well, I already know how to be gay (wrestling is gay, admit it!), but I might ask you to tell me about your life. What it was like to be beaten and humiliated by a father who was also betraying and abandoning his wife, what it was like to grow into your good looks and your power while you were also coming into your gentle intuition, what it was like to twist yourself into white culture because you thought it was the best way to give your two mixed-race boys a bright future. 

You were right about that last point, by the way. My "whiteness" has indeed granted me access to rooms that you were not allowed to enter. But the joke is on them, Dad, because despite how I look, I am a not just a white man, I am also brown. I am not just of my white mother, I am also of you. And were you alive today, I would look you in the eye and tell you that I have strived to become what you were not given the opportunity to be: a three dimensional man. And believe it or not, I learned how to do that by watching your struggle. Your struggle, and the suffering that went along with it, inspired me to be really careful about what I give fucks about. And what I give a fuck about is being a man whose masculinity is nothing more than one branch of my tree. Nothing more, and nothing less. 

Today, Father's Day 2022, I honor that part of me that is a continuation of you. If you could see us now, Dad...