I most recently posted the immediate thoughts and feelings after telling my therapist about my father’s role in my life, which I wrote about at length here. Over the past several days I have been largely depressed as I mulled over the impact childhood abuse has had on my life. I had been contrasting the trauma from both my parents and trying to find a thread to pull on, a story to tell myself that could help me integrate these events and how they have shaped my personality. I hadn’t immediately realized that’s what I was doing, but I knew that in order to move on I would need to find a way to accept the past, when my parents took advantage of my youth to abuse me. But it wasn’t just that I had to accept that it was ok for me, as a young child, to have been at a disadvantage, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to defend myself against the two people who are supposed to have protected me. No, I also had to come to terms with the ways some of that abuse has prepared me for a harsh world and has left me, in a way, unable to fit into the kinder softer world that I desire. Or, more pointedly, I desire a world in which I wouldn’t exist, in which parents protect their children better because they have the resources that enable them to be kinder. 

Let me be clear that I don’t think what my mom did was correct, but that, in the severity of it, I have become accustomed to a harsh world. I was telling a coworker of mine how I have my younger sister living with me, almost rent free, while she gets her life together. He commented that I was a nice older brother and I let him know that I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, necessarily, because I saw how quick to fall apart some of our coworkers were. This included, as I shared with him, some of our supervisors. By contrast, I felt that the worst things in life had already happened to me, my parents gave me no leeway and rather than let me live with them for extended periods of time, had kicked me out at seventeen and bid me make my way in the world. He said, “See, sometimes I think tough love is important.” Because I crave a kinder, softer world, I didn’t agree with him, but I did stay quiet and let him keep talking. I sometimes worry, am forced to acknowledge, that in my behavior I’m not creating that softer world, I’m just thriving in this one and wishing things were different. As I told my therapist during this most recent session, I can live with my mom’s trauma in that I can see the good and the bad in the effects of the trauma I have suffered at the hands of my mother. When the woman who birthed you has beat you, berated you, bullied you and then lied about it, nothing a coworker or contractor can legally do will phase you. And you’re not expecting anything from a cold world.

Not so with my father molesting me. That still feels like the pits of hell, although less so with every day I truly acknowledge it and the depravity of those actions. There was no well-meaning intent behind his perversion. There was simply the act of a physically larger person, a person who was trusted to take care of me as a child, unchaperoned, there was the act of this person taking advantage of my youth, my childlike body, my literal weakness. There is no making light of it nor finding a silver lining in my sexual awakening being at the hands of my father… And my therapist agreed with me. She affirmed that to even try to find one was folly, because while she seemed to appreciate that I could find something good in how my mother raised me, there was no doubt in her mind that I was right to say this was just all bad. As she reiterated, my father is a monster.

She even tried to get me to write a letter and I told her I understood the therapeutic exercise but that I had nothing to say beyond I hate you and I wish you had never come into my life. I told her that I had seen people, met others who had been abandoned by their fathers. Not to play the oppression Olympics with them, but I let her know that it felt like I could have overcome the painful guilt of abandonment so much easier than the feelings I have regarding my molestation. To belabor the point, I did have those feelings of abandonment, I do remember feeling in some way responsible for my dad not being around before I met him.

For the first decade of my life, I didn’t know my biological father and I was distinctly aware of this. I recall the elementary school yard watching other young boys who were playing soccer and wishing I knew how to play, but my mom didn’t know and my stepdad didn’t want to teach me. I never even felt safe enough around him to want to ask. I can recall these thoughts and feelings I had, watching these kids play at recess and knowing this was just something dads and older brothers taught them and that I was going to be excluded from that. I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone to teach me, didn’t even feel like I could join the other boys at play. This isn’t a moment where I went and discovered I preferred to be friends with girls either. No, I just sat alone and read, trying to push away the feeling of being left out because I didn’t have a dad.

I must have then, at some point, asked my mom about him. Given that the above is a memory I can recall and that I was at least in the third grade, if not a little older, this does line up. Not too much longer after that, I got to meet my dad. I remember being very excited, thinking that this was the best thing that ever happened to me. I remember feeling special, ready to forgive him for not being around and finally feeling like I was worthy of having a father, again, because it felt like my father hadn’t stuck around due to some character defect in me. And then things went downhill and my memories of the time are scrambled. Before I turned ten and after about fourteen, my memories have temporal relationships for each other. I can generally recall when two memories happened in relationship to each other. For example, one of the earliest memories I have is about catching and playing with a ladybug in the garden, which came before a particular afternoon in the pool during which I swam behind a woman because I had mistaken her tan swimming shorts for nudity and was shocked by what I thought I was seeing. From about ten to fourteen, when the childhood abuse peaked, the combined effect of the traumatic events shattered my perception of time. It wasn’t that I could no longer tell when it was morning or night, but rather and for example, I can’t place when my dad molested me in relation to other events involving him. Similarly, I don’t know if that most severe of beatings at my grandmother’s hands had already happened by the time I was molested, although I remember that these things happened around the same time. In order to live on, I had to bury the pain of these events, had to bury the boy that happened to. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I could attempt to freeze them out of my timeline, to trap those memories and that body feel outside of my timeline.

That day changed my life, and suddenly, the pain of abandonment didn’t seem so severe. I began a long campaign of getting away from my dad, of skipping weekends with him. Suddenly I wished for the days I had never known him. I used to say at least I got to meet his family, but the truth is they had always been in and out of my life, had always tried to maintain a relationship that he did not appreciate. Problematically, rather than my mom blaming an absent father for my sexuality, once she found out, she blamed my father molesting me. She didn’t even wait a while to ask this question, when I told her what my dad had done she and my grandma immediately and openly started theorizing that this is why I’m uno de esos. This must have been easier than listening to what I was saying, which is that I had fought and argued so much with the two of them for me to stop being left in my father’s care and that they had each and every time yelled at me and told me I was stupid for advocating for myself.

Pardon for abruptly changing topics, but during the session we also discussed my extreme aversion to unwanted physical contact. She said, “sweetheart, no one wants to be touched that way by strangers.” I got her point, I think perhaps she feels that I feel alienated by my emotions, like they’re not normal, but I don’t think she got mine. There’s a physical pain I feel sometimes emanating from my body… That’s not the right verb. There’s a physical pain I feel throughout my body and internally reverberating, almost like my body is shocking itself in disgust at any casual contact with another body. She asked if this happened in relationships too and I told her that, no but yes, that not often like she was referring to but sometimes and I would have to take a minute to collect from this intrusive recollection. There are times when someone brushes up against me, just to pass by, without lingering or even really acknowledging me and this shocks my body. We talked about concerts and packed venues, gay bars after everyone’s a little too drunk and starts to get too handsy. I told her of a specific time in WeHo, I had gone alone to the bars to take a break from my schoolwork and ran into someone who I couldn’t get off me. He was trying to undress me, the entire time insisting that he would make a good boyfriend for me and that I should have a drink. I had repeatedly and firmly kept telling him to get off me but he didn’t listen and instead tried to force me to drink, at which point I had swatted the drink out of my face and had run away. I didn’t tell her, because that wasn’t the point, but I had called a close friend crying, disturbed by what had happened. It was only during this week’s session that it clicked, my mom had always shamed me for getting angry or for physically engaging with the world and that had left me with tremendous guilt every time I had to act to protect myself. My body’s reaction to casual contact seems clearly linked to my father molesting me, but the anxiety around my inability to protect myself and my guilt when I have used anger to act in self-defense, that comes from my mother.

My parents have done all this only to abandon me again as an adult. I needed to cut off my father anyway, but even before I had exposed him, he had been growing more and more distant. I mentioned it in the past, but, once he was back to himself and following his mental breakdowns, his pride and shame led him to run from any support system. So it was that when in college I took him to Mexico to get mental help and he finally returned, he took a while to reach out to me and ask to see me. I had never been particularly close to him, but the time between our visits began to grow. Eventually, in graduate school, I started going to therapy and so it was that after his next breakdown, I was ready to confront him, to take the time after he’s back on his medication and rational, but before he has been on them too long and emotionally cold, to ask him a series of questions. Per our short interview, he had never wanted to be a father, had never loved my mother, and figured she would do a good enough job raising me, even though she was much poorer and undocumented. With these answers, my mother could move on from him and I could confirm to anyone who cared to doubt that my father was indeed a massive asshole. Of him molesting me though, there wasn’t much for him to say except, “It’s just how things are in el rancho…”

 

It isn’t as if I need either parent to put a roof over my head and feed me. But, especially as an adult man, having a rough time and not being able to go to your parents’ house or to call them for comfort, to vent, to feel reassured, that sucks. There’s no getting around the fact that I have living, breathing parentals that are not able to care for me in a way that I need them to. That support all must come from relationships I build with strangers, have thankfully built with many friends, or I have to allow myself to lean on my younger siblings. All of this could be worse, but still, what I really want is to go home and lay on my mother’s lap and have her sing me a lullaby or tell me it will be ok and to have me believe it, to feel the love and warmth from an older relative. Instead, I am coming to terms with the reality that I won’t get to experience what I’ve described. My father chose to exit the picture and my mother I had to block to stop her from spamming my phone with her anger and frustrations, disappointed as she is with her own living relationship and only able to process that by being angry at her two oldest kids. Add to that my mother’s sexist and machista attitudes, which lead to her specifically lashing out at my expressions of feelings and emotions, things she wasn’t allowed to have as a young person either but that her culture specifically only allows in certain kind of men.

That’s the depressing part. I had said at the beginning that I was looking for a thread to tie this all up neatly in my past, allow it all to become part of my story, part of the drive that I have had thus far in life. There’s a couple quick things. I grew up in a harsh environment and am now in a harsh environment that pays well. Construction and engineering are somewhat lucrative fields, completely dominated by men that struggle to express what they really mean, men who let ego and feelings get in the way of work, but are unable to recognize that happening because men don’t have feelings. So my parents teaching me to disregard my emotions, to swallow my ego, lets me take in everything around me and synthesize the needs of many people to find a solution that seems most reasonable, minimizing the burden on specific groups but recognizing how our contracts obligate certain responsibilities onto other groups and having enough ego to insist on and see the solution through. I was praised recently by several coworkers and supervisors for how I had been handling a couple weeks of touchy situations recently. A superintendent said, “You don’t even seem bothered by all the ranting he does,” in reference to a specific and difficult coworker. I told him my parents were worse and that no matter how long the rant, I still got my paycheck at the end of the day. That I owed so much professional success to my childhood background caused a tinge of pain but acknowledging this and incorporating it into my story will help me move on.

As for moving forward, I have to borrow from Cruising Utopia to abate the despair in realizing that I’m too harsh for the kinder, softer world I desire. I know that the phrase itself originated from a webcomic, A Softer World, that I used to read, although I had found the idea first and the webcomic second. In fact, the original comic relates a darker setting, a softer world that doesn’t judge the dark and sexual violence of the protagonist. Perhaps at the time I saw my sexuality as something dark and could only relate to the idea of a softer world ironically, but now there is no sarcasm or ironic defense, what has always driven me since I was young was the desire to create a kinder, softer world, for the young versions of me that I couldn’t go back and raise. In honor of when I needed a helping hand and in gratitude of those who extended one, I have dedicated myself to this idea. However, I have feared and have seen how my upbringing has prepared me for rougher environments, emotionally cold and stunted, but profitable. These fears have been assuaged by the idea in Cruising Utopia that those of us who work toward a queerer world are then left behind when that queerer world is created; we are the products of a straighter environment and so do not even know what we need to unlearn to continue being able to push out further and further the acceptance of our ever changing society. A different synthesis to Munoz’s argument is that each generation must push change and then must step aside and let the newer generations push as well. In this I find some permission to continue being myself, to note the things from my upbringing that I want to change but also not to excessively blame myself for not being a softer person, for not having the ease and loving attitude of someone who grew up sheltered, with stable parents and in affluent neighborhoods. And most importantly, simply to accept that I can have grown in the environment I did and still aspire to see a healthier change in the world beyond just revenge against my parents but not feel guilty when those feelings occur.