Familias descosidas
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
A few days ago
I got an email from my father,
who I haven’t seen in a long, long time.
My heart skipped a beat.
I decided quite a while ago
to stop seeing my dad,
because I realized that after
thousands of second chances,
I couldn’t take any value
from the relationship.
He just didn’t do me any good.
In the email he invited me to meet
for his birthday.
And, subtly, he blamed me
for being a terrible daughter.
Well, maybe not that subtly.
Even though I knew that not seeing him
didn’t make me a bad person
or anything like that,
I felt a ton of guilt.
So I went to see a friend,
a bit to digest all these emotions
that I was going through.
And after listening to me,
he looked at me, chilling,
and went like:
“Juli, we ain’t no Jesus.”
This struck me.
Sure, right?
Only someone like Jesus
can forgive anyone
for whatever they have done.
But what really got me
from this reasoning
was that he never
told me anything like:
“Juli, he’s your dad, how come
you don’t want to see him?”
As I had been listening
from most people
I’ve been talking about this.
Because, who do we call dad?
Who does really earn such title?
Or, mind me, with just
laying down is enough?
I realized how much it’s taken for a fact
that our family is only
the biological one.
Even when we know other forms of family
the biological one has priority.
It’s always showcased as “the best”,
whether on purpose or not.
The natural one, the one that’s right.
Where does this idea come from
that we have to love our parents
just because they’re our parents?
I mean, why not love them
for the relationship we have with them,
because they take care of us,
because they do us good?
I had a hard time understanding that
there’s no such thing as a school
to teach parents how to love
their children, not to hurt them.
It was hard to get that family
was a construct,
because it went against what
I had heard throughout my life.
It was something presented to me
as natural.
I like to think of family like a t-shirt.
Well-sewn clothes.
So well sewn that
you can’t tell the stitches.
But what’s happens?
If you don’t feel comfortable,
if you don’t have a good time,
or if there’s someone who
is making you miserable,
they tell you that this what you got.
When things start
to crack inside a family,
especially when this acute pain
comes all of a sudden,
the seams start bothering.
They get visible.
They itch, they prick,
sometimes they hurt.
The sewings started bothering me
the moment when being at home
became something unbearable.
Something that made me suffer
and cry a lot.
But I had to do anyway.
Because that was the hand I was dealt.
You can’t imagine how it struck me
when I came to know that
what I was suffering was violence.
That’s when I thought of turning
this t-shirt I’m talking about
inside out.
And I saw the seams.
The ones we all have,
which are created and get sewn
as we grow
and with the relations we forge.
Sometimes for good,
sometimes for worse.
When we have a family
that in some situations do us wrong,
clearly and effectively wrong,
we have a hard time understanding
we’re not trapped in that web forever,
and that we can weave other connections.
I began to undo this
I had been sold as “what you got”,
and I looked for other family ties.
I allowed myself to know other families
and other ways of parenting.
Other behind-the-scenes.
And I started to find places that gave me
the ties that I was so looking for,
which I forged and made my own:
my school, my friends
and my mom’s friends,
the families of my friends, you name it.
I didn’t answer that email to my dad.
In fact, until today,
I never saw him again.
But this is my experience.
What everyone experiences
throughout their lives
shapes the way they see the world.
We don’t have to stay still
and do nothing
if we’re feeling miserable.
This can also open the door
to ask ourselves new questions.
And to undo many plots.
Thank you very much.