How I got to know my son, and learned to be thankful for my surrogate father (original) (raw)

Over the last two months, like many people across the world, I have been living in lock down mode, staying home, practicing physical distancing, working from home. But, unlike many, I have been most fortunate to have been doing so with my son. I was scheduled to be away for the spring and most of the summer traveling abroad, doing research and giving lectures and seminars. My son had agreed to move into my house and take care of it while I was away. All of those plans went out the window when the pandemic unleashed its deadly vector on the world. I returned to the States, and my son, who studies at the University where I teach, was also quarantined. He was laid off from his job, and he could not go anywhere else, not New York, where he grew up and most of his friends live, which was turning into the epicenter of the pandemic in the US. So, over the last months, we have spent a lot of time together, alternating cooking dinners, going for walks, hanging out and talking. He tried to teach me a card game, and I helped him put together a computer from scratch. All the time we have had to spend has been some of the best time I have had in my adult life. I have unexpectedly felt good about being a father, notwithstanding the terrible times. I knew my son was a gentle, generous, funny person. But, I did not know the depths of his goodness. He is a left democrat, of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders persuasion. He is funny, in the Colbert type of humor, but also is quick to express his outrage at the injustice of our society, in the John Oliver school of political humor. He is very explicit about his anti-racism and critical of how we have stepped back from the vision and passion of the civil rights. Parents are expected to like their children and to express their approval of them, even if only perfunctorily. But over the last couple of months, I come to realize that my son is a genuinely wonderful person, a person that I would want to be friends with and that I would want in my life, regardless of whether they were or not family. Getting to know my son, has forced me to think a lot about myself as a father. One of the big question that has guided this self-inspection has been: how did I managed to father of such a wonderful human being? That has been the rather unusual, and generally unasked, question that I have been asking myself as I gotten to know my son. Unusual, for in fact I did not, originally, want to be a father. I had had bad experiences with my biological father and a step-dad, my mother's second husband. I grew up fatherless, and for the most part moving from one aunt to another, until I was able to reunited with my mother, who had come to the United States to forge a path and create a life for herself and her children. I remember indelibly my father beating my mother, and I as a small child trying to shield her. But I also repressed a lot, as I found out recently. My father, in fact, disappeared from our lives, until he reappeared a couple of days before he died of a heart attack and stroke. He came to visit us, my brother and I, and I remember spending some afternoons, and visiting him in the hospital. He must have sensed he was dying. I remember his big, hirsute body. He seemed to always have a five a clock shadow. He smoked, incessantly. I remember the smell of his cigarettes, but also of what later I came to recognize as the smell of alcohol. But, I don't remember his voice, or any particular phrase, or anything he may have said to me. Over the last couple of years I have been interviewing my mother about her childhood, and about our lives before she left. My mother is the historian of my apocryphal childhood; the teller of a story she only can tell. I have asked her about how he met my father, what happened between them, and why my father disappeared from our lives, and why she remarried a man who