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Maybe I’d always had the wrong idea as to who I really was.
Mima says we are what we remember.
“Do you ever wonder about your real father, Salvie?” He didn’t stop painting, and I couldn’t see his face. As I sat down on his old leather chair, I heard myself say, “You’re my real father—and yes, I wonder about you all the time.”
“But we can afford it,” I’d say. And then he’d say: “No, I can afford it. You, on the other hand, can’t even afford to pay for your cell phone.”
“I don’t have to explain anything to anyone.” “Wrong. Sometimes you have to explain things to yourself.”
My dad called that sort of behavior whistling in the dark. Well, I guess that when you found yourself in the dark, you might as well whistle. It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.
How can this man love me so much? I felt like such an asshole. How could I even think or wonder about the man whose genes I had? What did genetic makeup mean anyway, compared with the man who raised and loved me? I was such an asshole.
I relate to this so much. When you feel bad for genuinely wondering about your bio family because it feels like you are being mean to your adopted family by wondering. But it’s not true and both families are important and should have a place in that child’s life. They shouldn’t have to wonder.
And then I thought that maybe life was like that—there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
“All your life I’ve tried to protect you from all the shit in the world, from all the bad things. But I can’t protect you from this. I can’t protect you and I can’t protect Sam. All I have is a shoulder. And that will have to do. When you were a little boy, I used to carry you. I miss those days sometimes. But those days are over. I can walk beside you, Salvie—but I can’t carry you.
And I didn’t tell my dad that I was having thoughts about my bio father. I was wondering if I looked like him, if I acted like him, and that I was starting to have thoughts that maybe I should at least meet him. Sam had met her father. Fito had met his father. And then there was me. How could I tell my dad all these things I hadn’t told him?
Risk averse. That’s what Sam said I was. It was a nice way of saying I was afraid of trying new things. Maybe what it really meant was that I was a coward. Maybe I lost my temper with guys who acted like assholes because I wasn’t brave enough to talk to them.
I needed to stop analyzing myself. I didn’t have the credentials to be my own therapist.
Just because you don’t like yourself doesn’t mean other people don’t like you.
Maybe I was going through a phase. And maybe phases were important. Maybe phases told us something important about ourselves.
“Why’d you go back?” I asked. “She’s my mother.” Sam put in her two cents. “She’s toxic. You do know that, don’t you?” “Yeah,” Fito said. “Doesn’t change the fact that she’s my mother.”
‘Some people are born on third base, and they go through life thinking they hit a triple.’” Fito laughed. “I like that.” My dad nodded. “Yeah. Fito, you’re not one of those people. A guy like you was born in the locker room, no one ever pointed you in the direction of the baseball diamond, and somehow you managed to get yourself into the dugout. And something in you just doesn’t believe he belongs in the game. But you do, you do belong in the game. One of these days you’re going to be up at bat. And you’re going to hit it out of the ballpark.
“You know how I feel about solving things with your fists.” “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think I jumped in because I was doing problem solving—”
I can ground you. I can punish you. I can give you a lecture. I don’t think that’s going to solve what’s going on with you.”
And I couldn’t stand anyone calling me a white boy because I belonged to a family, and when people called me that, all I heard was that I did not belong to that family. And I did belong to them, and I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me otherwise.
All this time I’d been so scared that I was going to turn out to be like a biological father I’d never met. I’d underestimated myself. In the end, wasn’t it up to me to choose? Didn’t we all grow up to be the kind of men we wanted to become?
My dad told me once, “If you make a mistake, don’t live in it.” He also said that we do things—important things—only when we’re ready to do them. I think he’s right. But sometimes life forces our hand. Sometimes we have to make decisions whether we’re ready to make them or not.
