Disconnected Dominican Girl Pt. 2
Sometimes you wish your family wasn't cursed. Imagine what it could have been if you guys were able to stay together? Separated only by an ocean and not unspoken hurts. It has to be a curse, right?
You’ve known yourself to be just Dominican enough to claim it as your culture, even though you barely feel it to be true. Your connections to the island you were born on are restricted to the foods you cook, the music you feel deep in your blood, and the smell of petroleum that randomly fills your senses with longing. Longing for something that sits just under the surface of your thoughts but never connects to a core memory.
When you think of a Dominican family, what do you see? It’s never your family. Yours is that of a highly dysfunctional cautionary tale on how not to treat your flesh and blood. Split into envy-filled pieces, damaged beyond repair with traumas that linger in the hugs delicately wrapped in loud silence.
You see a family tree, like the ones you were never able to complete in elementary school, with so many branches covered in rich leaves that cover the branches that shouldn't be there but everyone knows exist. A solid set of storytellers perched atop with a hate for one another nestled deep in their cores. You wonder how they ever come together. And they’ll tell you. They’ll also tell you why they stayed together.
You get your fix for all of the things your family could not provide in books, on TVs, or at the family gatherings of friends you’ll soon lose just like you've lost the leaves on your tree. With slow winds whispering the uncertainties of a forced connection.
You insert yourself in the tiniest ways into the lives of these characters. Lives that feel so similar to your own but so very different.
You wonder how your grandparents met, why family wasn't enough for solid roots, and how your mother got to NYC with two little girls in tow. You wonder and wonder about your history with a fear that keeps the thoughts tethered to the headache on the right side of your brain. You fear that any question could unearth some unresolved trauma that none of you are strong enough to work through because the years of avoidance and living to survive have made you all too fragile to recall a memory. You remain curious because the alternative feels too complicated.
Maybe there’s something honorable to be said about choosing sanity or safety over sad family life. But that pride remains absent.
Your family didn't stay together, and you’ve honestly never seen a photo of your wise elders together. You‘re in a constant state of anemoia for those elders you’re told to respect. The elders that have not a single story of you all together.
You nestle yourself into the pieced together madness of other families, and it’s enough. So long as you leave with a tiny sense of what could have been. A new spin on a recipe. Anything that’ll allow you to remain in the space where you can say you were born on the island.
