The Rusted Chain

I worried that my parents would kill each other.

It went like this growing up: Mom and Dad would go through the permutations of working class life - work long hours, fend for the family at home, attend to chores, routines, and carve out some time for relaxation. They made minimal effort when it came to my brother’s and my interests. But this wasn’t their fault. They were too tired and bewildered to try and understand us. They were dutiful in making sure we were cared for. That we had a roof above our heads, food on our plates, and some money in our pockets. They were even able to offer some decent advice, from time to time. But mostly all they could really do was leave us alone. Leave us to figure things out, while reacting with humor or hostility to the ever changing fabric of American culture we brought home.

This is when things were good.

But then a comment. A petty insult. A broken promise. My father’s drinking slowly spiraling out of control, or my mother’s obsession with cleanliness setting us all on edge. Tension would roil invisible storm clouds within our apartment, reverberating through the cracked walls, the ticking radiator, the roaches’ antennae. We would come and taste the ozone of rage tainting every square inch of our ghetto palace. 3H would thrum and pulse with a rising growl, and even police sirens or the aggressive voices of corner boys would pale in comparison to its snarl.

There really is a calm before a storm.

My mother would sing along to salsa from La Mega on the radio and somehow make it sound terrifying.

My father would watch soccer or Sabado Gigante and take no joy from anything coming at him from the screen.

Because they were both lost. Both caught in the cruel currents of pain that inflamed their need to lash out.

And then it would happen.

An explosion of words, screams, and crashes that we knew was coming, but still hoped to never experience again. My parents would war over whatever slights they claimed they could no longer stand, chasing each other from room to room as both launched fusillades of insults that did nothing to help them understand why the other was angry. They sought to hurt. They sought to rend. They sought to pour every ounce of pain and betrayal experienced in their lives onto the other, locked in a titanic embrace of barbed wire that neither could nor would extricate themselves from. Both would extoll every reason why they hated the other. Why they couldn’t understand how they were still together. And sometimes…rarely, but sometimes…there would be violence. One would lash out, a quick strike that would either silence them both or lead to more screaming. Neither battered each other. Not the way you think. Rather, it was like missile strikes exchanged between battlecruisers. Vicious blasts that left chaos in their wake.

Then, after all this, there would be silence. Long and stretched out. A tightrope of resentment strung through our home, as both balanced themselves on the unspoken but sacred agreement that neither one wanted to speak to the other.

In many ways, this time was the worst.

Eventually the armistice would end in one final skirmish, another screaming match borne of the frustration of being unable to coexist with someone you were not speaking to. In the ensuing quiet, peace would be offered with tiny favors: a favorite snack bough at the supermarket, a favorite album played at just the right moment. No one would ever say they were sorry. They would just start talking about the minutia of everyday life: work, hood politics, how strange and idiotic my brother and I were.

And then the cycle would start again.

This went on until my father succumbed to alcoholism and died.

You think they’re bad parents.

I don’t even have to ask.

Truth is, they really weren’t.

They were both immigrants from a small town in Honduras that has domestic violence, societal injustice, and poverty ingrained into its very DNA. They both came to America as kids - both 19 and not knowing a word of English. They busted their asses, bouncing from job to job, and finally made enough to make a decent go for our family in a small barrio in Queens, New York.

I can sit here on my laptop and write all this out because of them.

And I love them.

Even for all the trauma, I will always love them.

Because none of it was their fault.

Trauma is a rusted chain. It’s built, link by link, by broken people who can’t understand why the people before them hurt them so badly. When all you know is dysfunction - when your whole world is shaped by good people who can’t make sense of their worst urges - then these corroded patterns are the easiest thing in the world to repeat.

My father never knew his father. My grandfather left him, his mother, and his brothers and sister when my father was a toddler. My father was basically a street kid, running wild, rudderless, until he was literally kidnapped by an MP in an ice cream shop and forced into the military where he took part in a hyper-brief war fought between Honduras and El Salvador that my father did not nor could not explain. He experience combat, and did not know how to process it. He had experience every kind of trauma, and just thought it these injustices were the way a man’s life was supposed to be.

My mother knew both of her parents, and I still think that might be a terrible thing. Her father kidnapped her from her mother - a mother who had something like eight to ten other children - and raised her to be clean, classy, and hardworking. But my grandfather also beat her like it was his job, married a woman who made her life a living hell, and denied her the opportunity to partake in all the everyday things a lot of us take for granted. She knew she was experiencing trauma. She knew life was not supposed to be that way. But she also did not understand how to break the cycle.

The rusted chain stretches across generations. It infects every link without purpose or recognition. Trauma is a disease that is only now being classified, a silent despot that has reigned over families for too long. The thing that everyone knows, but no one ever says, is that breaking the cycle - shedding yourself of the rust - is a traumatic act in and of itself. It takes recognizing that the people you love are wrong. That the people who were supposed to teach you everything, be your everything, were fucked up. That despite how much you love them, you don’t want to be like them.

That’s no easy task.

But it’s a necessary one. Those of us who finally recognized the corrosive nature of our experiences have a duty to face this hideousness head-on. We have no choice but put ourselves through the forge and fire of grief, recognition, and acceptance, so we can come out the other side clean.

Most of all, we have a duty to forgive.

The only way trauma ends is by calling it by its name. We can’t blame it, hate it, or even excuse it. We just have to see it for what it is - pain redirected. Ignorance expounded. A loss of innocence masquerading as necessity. Many parents who fuck their children up actually think they’re doing them a favor. Think that they’re preparing them for the world and its realities. When, in truth, they’re adding to the quotient of human suffering. They’re expanding a sickness that is eating us away from the inside.

My parents did the best they could. They did a lot of messed up things. They hurt us - my brother and me - in ways they could not understand. That hurts. It always will. But I can’t hate them. I can’t even be angry at them anymore. To do that would be to add another layer to the rust. Another variant of the disease. I have to forgive them. For my sake. For my daughter’s. For humanity, most of all.

The rusted chain won’t stay rusted.