Does Love Have To Be Pain

I was 3 when my parents separated. The childhood memories I have of my dad were not from when he lived with us and we were a full family. Since memories fade and fade the older I get, I often confuse them with dreams or imaginations from my childhood that I made up in my head. 3 is too young. I have no memory of my mother sharing a bed with a husband as a child. We had a King sized bed that all 4 four of us shared up until we moved and my sister finally got her own room and bed, and eventually my brother too. I shared a bed with my mom until I was 10 years old.

Our childhood is categorized by the house we lived in. South Pointe was where I was born and have plenty of blurry, yet fond memories. Dad would visit every Wednesday and bring Munchkins from Dunkin' Donuts and fall asleep on the couch immediately when he arrived. He's a musician and spent his days asleep. I remember my brother and I playing pranks on him while he snoozed; cotton balls in his nose because he snored so loud, tying his shoelaces together. He would teach us how to ride bikes. He had a motorized scooter and one day, we were either going to or coming home from preschool (Kiddie Lab) and we hit a pothole and fell off. I had a little scrape on my knees but he stopped the fall with his hand and hurt his hand pretty badly. I am still freaked out by motorbikes to this day.

And then maybe I was just a little bit older and more aware of things, but when we moved to Park View I started lying to my friends about where my dad was. He worked late and left early so they never saw him. He traveled. He would come and visit and we would swim at the community pool, ride bikes, fly kites. Then there was a time when we didn't see him for a long time. Mom said something about how she ran into him at the movies with his new wife and she asked him for child support and how he was probably embarrassed so he stopped showing up. My sister was in high school at that time and I was too young to really understand what was happening. I don't remember how exactly but he just started showing up again. I remember asking my kids church teachers to pray that my parents would get back together. 

I have this blurry memory of me crying as a little kid, holding a sippy cup and watching my parents fight from a window. I'm not sure if it's a memory or a dream. Another memory I have is us watching a movie together as a family, Karate Kid 2 and it all somewhat ending with my mom smashing his windshield window. Even as I type this I am emotional even though the memory is so vague and only pieced together from stories that my family has mentioned over the years. - I have not thought about it in years. 

I was so young and I know I am lucky for that. My sister was old enough to know what was going on and I hope one day we could talk about it as mature adults and about how it has affected her. My sister is an enigma I wish to one day explore. I wonder if my brother remembers? I hope one day we can all just talk about it. 

Commart Townhomes were a dark season. My brother started acting out and was kicked out of the house multiple times. My mother never knew how to deal with him and blamed my father for how he was acting. I really hated living there. I remember every dusk for about a year I would get anxiety attacks that I had no language for except to say that I was bored. I would call up my mother almost at exactly the same time every night and tell her I was bored and cry because I needed her to come home. It wasn't until years later that I realize what I was going through. I developed my eating disorder there because I was a latchkey kid and I fed myself. I was 13 years old and coming home to an empty house. I really didn't mind it when it was happening, but now that I think about it I really shouldn't have been. 

It was around that time that mom's job would have her traveling a lot so my grandmother or my dad would stay with us while she was gone. We had a maid, who quit because of how horrible my brother was to her. One time when dad was staying with us, my brother and I got into an argument, that house was so full of tension, and my dad intervened just by yelling at us. I hated him at that moment. 

We finally moved to Katarungan Village, our own house, but it was much further away from dad and it was with our grandmother. At this time, dad would just meet us at the mall instead of the house to avoid her. We liked going to the mall because we like eating. I would be 18 when I found out that my dad was always high on weed or other herbal stuff. I didn't like finding that out, but then it kind of started making sense. There were multiple times that he would say he would pick me up from school to hang out but then flake. Eventually I would learn that dad will be there for you when you need him, when it's convenient for him. 

I love my father. He is the funniest man I have ever met. He pushes me to do what I am passionate about because he refuses to do anything except his own. He is not the kind of father I wish I had. I wish I had a father who I could talk to about things, the kind of father who was always around. These days he'll message our group chat with all his kids and tell us that he misses us and loves us. Right now as I type this I am listening to his band's music and I am emotional. I have accepted my father for who he is and who he is not in my life. But it does not stop the pain from being real. It does not stop me from loving him, and it does not stop making the distance apart from him difficult. I know my relationship with my father bleeds a lot into my relationship with my leaders, my friends, and even lovers. I recognize the damage that he has caused but I do not blame him. My parents were children who had their own childrenand now I feel as though I've caught up to them and I see how difficult it must have been raising us. 

I wish so much that my childhood had been different and less traumatic, that memories of my father weren't so hard to come up with and weren't so blurry because there aren't a whole lot of good ones. I wish so much that talking about my father wasn't so painful and emotional. I used to pretend I didn't care about my father but I think the hardest part is knowing the shortcomings of an imperfect human and yet still loving them with all your heart. I can see how I approach love as pain because loving my father is very painful. Recently I find myself reconnecting with my heritage of being a Filipino and I hope that this means also reconnecting and making new memories with my own father.