My Failures As A Father: Chapter 3
WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE
My grandmother says I look just like him.
Mother doesn’t dare tell us stories.
My brothers and I never speak of him.
The phone number wasn’t familiar. I hesitated for a moment but still answered my cell with a casual hello. The voice on the other end of the line was familiar. It’s a voice that instantly took me back to Trinidad where I saw myself as a three-year-old child sitting on my father’s lap. We’re in his jeep crawling through our neighbourhood, my hands on the steering wheel and his hands on top of mine. His beard is brushing against the top of my head and when we finally stop, he lifts me off his lap and holds me up to the sky.
That memory is so clear that sometimes I think I made it up. It’s like I have to convince myself that there was a time my father actually cared. That at some point, I was worth something to him. But if this memory really is fake, it means there was nothing. Nothing to hold on to, nothing good to remember. If it’s real, it might be even more painful because I’d have to accept that my father made a choice to leave a child he supposedly loved.
Part of me feels like I should be more sympathetic. He and my mom were never married, and later, my family found out that my father was in another relationship when he and my mom met. So when my mom chose to move to Canada, my father had to make a decision. Stay or leave. His children or Trinidad.
This couldn’t have been easy for him. We all lived in the same home back on the island — my mother, two brothers and my father — so at one point, we were a family. My father’s rule over the home was forceful, and being slapped across the face or back was routine for me and my brothers. I wonder if the force of his presence is why I barely have any memories of my mother during this period. She was there with us, of course, and I imagine her to be just as opinionated as she is today. But when I think of that home, I think of my father.
My grandmother would be sick if she read that last sentence. She hated my father. I can say that confidently because she’s told me this many times.
“He could drop dead,” she would say, in a harsh Trini accent that only natives would understand. “I don’t know why your mother had three children for him.”
My grandmother has no problem speaking her mind, and from the stories she’s told me, she has a right not to like my father. When my mom left for Canada, she didn’t take us with her. Not at first. She needed time to secure a job as a nurse and make sure she was set up to manage all three of her children. I was about four when she left, which means my older brother was seven and my younger brother was one.
While my mom was gone, my dad was supposed to take care of us. That never happened. Instead, my brothers and I stayed with my grandmother and grandfather in another part of the island called Laventille. My grandparent’s home in Laventille is where most of my memories from Trinidad take me. The home we lived in was built by my grandfather. It was separated into two sections that was like having two different homes. Downstairs had two bedrooms, two living areas and a kitchen. Upstairs, where my brothers and I stayed, had three bedrooms, a larger kitchen and a veranda where my grandfather taught me to tie my shoes. Outside, we had chickens in our yard, a washing board and clothesline to wash and hang laundry, and a Chenette tree that we climbed when we played outside.
My grandmother always laughs when she tells me the story of how my dad thought we were rich because our house was so big. She’s not nearly as amused when she talks about how he went more than six months without ever coming to visit us. Six whole months. He only lived 30 minutes away yet chose never to see his kids. When my grandmother asked him to at least send some money, he told her we’re not his problem. This was my father.
I don’t remember my mom ever explaining to us why our dad never came to Canada. Maybe she figured I was too young. Maybe the truth was too hurtful to share. But even to this day, I don’t think I know the real reason, or any reason at all, as a matter of fact.
What I do remember is sitting beside my friend in third or fourth grade and asking him what it was like to have a father.
“Do you guys go out together? Do you go fishing? Does he take you out to eat?”
My questions were based on what I observed watching popular sitcoms. Shows like Full House and Family Matters were shaping my impressions of what a father could be. Where was my Danny Tanner to read me bedtime stories? Where was Carl Winslow to tell me he was proud? I started feeling resentful. My father was alive and well. He could’ve been with us if he wanted to but he wasn’t.
That resentment deepened when I was nearing high school. We were still living in community housing, a three-bedroom apartment on Weston Road. My older brother had his own room and my younger brother and I shared a bunk bed. Roaches swarmed the kitchen but only when we turned off the lights for the night. That kitchen light became a signal from my mother that it was time to turn off the TV or put away the Nintendo till the morning.
On one of those mornings, she told us that we would be going to New York to visit our Godparents.
“And your father will be there, too.”
I was only 11 or 12, but I don’t think my shock and confusion would’ve receded in any way had I been older. We hadn’t seen our father since we left Trinidad half a dozen years prior. In my mind, he was still there because he couldn’t be here with us. To know that he was in New York and not Toronto was like a slap to the face. Why would he choose to move there instead of here? What could possibly be in New York that was more important than his kids? More important than me?
I couldn’t express any of these thoughts to my mother. Even with me being an adult today, she’s tight-lipped with any details of my father, negative or positive. I don’t know how they met, why they never married, how they split; nothing. Back then, there was far less revealing. So when she told us that we’re going to New York and that our father would be there, the expectation was we didn’t ask any questions. It’s like the kitchen light was always off when it came to my father, and we put away any thoughts that would cause that switch to turn back on.
Maybe it’s ironic that not many years later, my mother would be bringing my daughter to visit me in New York. That when I was faced with the decision to leave or stay, I chose the former. Although the circumstances were vastly different, there were some commonalities that frightened me. And from the first day Kathy told me she was pregnant, I was aware of those parallels. Many of the decisions I made was me wanting to take revenge on my father for his absence.
So I dropped out of high school as revenge for his absence.
I moved out of my mother’s house and into a single-room basement to be with my pregnant girlfriend as revenge for his absence.
I almost gave up on my ambitions as a basketball player as revenge for his absence.
I cried on that greyhound as revenge for his absence.
It scares me that I share his DNA. That part of me is part of him. I wish I could isolate those precise strands and rip them out of my body forever. That way I know for sure that none of who he is would ever be inside of me. I want to make it so that his failures as a father would remain his own and not somehow seep itself into my body, into my relationship with my daughter, into any part of my life.
I don’t remember anything from my visiting New York to see my father. My mom tells me that we saw him briefly at a store he was working at. There’s a cursory memory of seeing his grey beard, but nothing deep enough in my mind that I can grasp. What I remember most was the feeling of anger before that trip, followed by my return to indifference once we got back.
Today, my daughter asks me if I would ever speak to my father again. I tell her, without explanation, that I wouldn’t. When she prods, I don’t give in. My mother has taught me well.
When I answered the phone that day, my father was mid-sentence.
“You don’t understand how hard it was.”
I’m not even sure he said hello. He certainly didn’t ask how I was doing or acknowledge the 15 years that had gone by since we last spoke. I had just moved into a new apartment the year after getting full custody of Krystasia. I was sitting at the corner of the couch closest to the balcony staring out at a view that captured the heartbeat of Toronto. My mind was still stuck on how thankful I was to have found that apartment, especially after the disaster of our previous place.
“I want you to come to Trinidad.” The voice was like a ghost whispering in my dreams.
“Huh?” I said. And I meant that with all sincerity because I really didn’t understand what he was trying to say.
“I want you to come to Trinidad to see how I live.”
None of this made sense. Was he back in Trinidad now? Since when? And why would he want me to come out there to see how he lived? What did that even mean?
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said. That response was far too polite. There should’ve been more rage in my voice. I should’ve demanded he tell me where he’s been for over a decade.
I didn’t need to ask how he got my number. My mother couldn’t help herself.
“He’s your father,” she would say when I called her immediately afterwards. Like that title was supposed to mean something to me. Like if she wasn’t one of his victims. And yes, I do mean victim. We all were. Even though I despise that word, how else can we be described? If someone gets shot, they’re a victim. They may choose to deal with their victimhood in a manner that doesn’t continue to impact their life moving forward, but it doesn’t change the fact that they were the victim of a shooting. They can be as strong as they want, if you lift up their shirt, that scar would still be present. Healed but forever part of their story.
And it’s as if my mother wanted my father to somehow remain part of our story. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get why she gave him so many chances. Plus her refusal to speak negatively about him, honestly about him, also came across as protection. Not protection for us, but protection for him. But what was she protecting? And what reason does she have for protecting my father?
Part of me feels like maybe it’s not about my father. Not completely. If it’s true that people only push you as far as you let them, then my mom would’ve been complicit in many of the transgressions committed by my father. She would have to face up to the fact that my father was in a relationship when she met him. That the other woman in that relationship lived with my father in New York. My mother would have to come to terms with the fact that most of our family hated my father and he hated them back. She would have to confront the reality that the father of her children didn’t show any interest in that title; then, now, or ever.
That’s a lot to accept, and maybe my mother has made peace with those choices within herself. But expressing those failures to her kids, to her mother, that’s a different kind of accountability that I haven’t witnessed from her. Instead, she glazes over stories of my father’s ineptitude. She’s constructed a home where her own parenting has been near flawless. She’s never brought another man into our lives, never tagged us with a stepfather. She found enough time in her schedule to take us to football and basketball practice and rarely miss any games. She made it so that there would be no need to infer about the failures of our father because she gave us all she thought we needed. Why would it matter that he’s not here?
Asking that question would feel like a betrayal of her sacrifice. Condemnation for how far first she put her children. None of us dare intrude on this construction or risk pulling a brick from a load-bearing wall. And for too long, we conceded that the risk was not worth the tumble. Not for all our mother had given us. So we stayed silent and only listened to the whispers.
“Water under the bridge.” That’s how she explained my father’s absence to my daughter. Krystasia and I were visiting one afternoon. I was upstairs on my laptop when I overheard their conversation.
“Water under the bridge.”
The statement was more casual than her tone, yet it still struck me deep enough that I stopped typing. I realized then that my father’s truancy had always felt like no big deal. I was made to believe that I didn’t suffer from his absence. That I was fine without him. That having such a capable mother transcended any attention or support my father could’ve provided.
After being a father for 18 years, I know none of that is true.
And as I reflect on those 18 years, with all of its guilt and fear and coping with my own feelings of failure, I know my mere presence has been a gift. A gift I was never fortunate enough to receive. A gift my mother, in her heart, knows means more than she would ever admit.