My Father 

By S.B.

 

We learned about bad guys and good guys as early as First Grade. Mrs. Binder, after psychoanalyzing Batman and Joker, had explained to us that, in fiction, there were heroes and villains–those who prevail and those who perish. I still remember how Nicolas Brunstein had jumped up from his miniature stool and exclaimed in his high-pitched voice that his father was his hero. He was a doctor, and Nicolas made sure to add that, when he grew up, he wanted to be just like him. I was only seven years old when I realized that real life isn’t like fiction at all. Things aren’t so cut and dry–so simple. There are no heroes and no villains. There are only people. From a very young age I realized that people are incredibly complex. They are flawed and imperfect. There is no such thing as a good person or a bad person. There are only actions–a person can be good to one and evil to another. And then there are those who are good on some days and evil on others. 

I immigrated to the United States of America when I was two years old, alongside my father. My mother commuted from the U.S. to India and back every six months in the middle of the immigration process. To me, her absence from the first two years of my life is a sacrifice she made in order to provide me with a better life. To my father, her absence represents a failure to complete her duties as a wife and as a mother. Throughout my childhood, both my parents worked hard in order to make ends meet as first generation immigrants. My mother worked odd jobs primarily, cooking, cleaning and working retail all while taking care of me. My father found office jobs fairly quickly due to his degree and began to earn much more than my mother in a matter of months following his arrival in the country. This resulted in resentment, and thus began the screaming matches, misunderstandings and, ultimately, the toxicity that became their marriage. 

Things were good when my younger brother was born a few years after we had moved to the United States. He was a unifying factor to our broken family. He healed the cracks in my parents relationship with his innocent presence. But this positive shift didn’t last for long. With the joy that he brought, he also brought an added responsibility and expenses. My mother went back to work only four months after having my brother. This caused further resentment–this time on the part of my mother, who felt cheated out of raising both of her children the way she wanted to due to my family’s financial constraints. 

The slowly disintegrating relationship between my mother and father directly impacted their treatment of my brother and me. The days he and my mother fought were called bad days in my family. On bad days, my father would yell and scream at me for the smallest mishaps, whether it be because I had left the light on or because I had not finished my homework. I was too young then to understand that his anger was directed at me, but not because of me. 

My brother had it much worse. He had the misfortune of having a soft spoken, mellow personality. From a young age, his persona strongly contrasted that of my authoritative, hyper-masculine father. When my father screamed, my brother would cry and hide behind my mother. This caused not only increasing distance in their relationship but bred resentment in my father, who felt that his son favored his mother over him. Perhaps that is why their relationship became strained as he grew up; today, they barely speak to one another. 

Not all days were bad days. Some days were sitting-in-front-of-the-television-for-hours-watching Tom and Jerry days. Some days were dance-party days. Some days were snow-sledding days. Some days were great days. On those days, my father was not driven by his anger or his resentment for my mother. He was simply my father. But as I grew older, those days became a rarity rather than a constant. I watched my father turn into an angry, bitter man as years went by. I watched him turn into a stranger rather than the man who was once my hero. 

So when Nicolas Brunstein stood up and snarkily remarked that his father was his hero, I did what I had wanted to do all year–I pushed him. He fell off his little stool and onto the cold, hard floor–back to reality. I was briskly sent to the principal’s office, lectured, given three days of no-recess detention and my parents were called. But I didn’t cry. Instead, I felt accomplished. I felt as though I had taught Nicolas Brunstein and like-minded snotty, show-offs that life wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. I felt as though I had made the point that there was no such thing as heroes; that, in the real world, there were just flawed people who behaved well on some days and badly on others. 

It wasn’t until I got home that day and saw the tears in my mother’s eyes that I realized that my accomplishments were lacking. Nicolas Brunstein was, in fact, a sheltered kid who, through no fault of his own did not understand all beings are flawed, even his father. I also realized I wasn’t some esteemed sensei, chosen by a higher power to educate the First Grade class on the truths of life, either. I was just a little girl who was jealous of kids like Nicolas Brunstein, who had parents who had seemingly more good days than bad ones.

 

S.B. wrote this memoir piece in Yehoshua (Josh) November’s Intro to Creative Writing class during the spring 2020 semester.