Essays: “How I Learned to Honor My Tears” by Gustavo Barahona-López

How I Learned to Honor my Tears

If you were to walk into my childhood home, you’d notice the darkness. My father dictated that the blinds in our small, three-bedroom duplex would stay shut at all times. Once my mother made the mistake of giving her treasured houseplants sunlight. She came home to find broken flower pots in our backyard. The plants struggled mightily to keep their roots attached to the soil.

My father, like many fathers, believed that men don’t cry. I can’t remember my father ever admitting to feeling emotional pain: he never complained about his back pain until he was sprawled on the ground rolling from one side of the living room to put out the flames. He never complained about feeling suffocated staying home day after day. He never complained about the half pint half of blood he spat out on a daily basis, the half pint of blood his body could not fully remake, the half pint of blood I would pour down the bathroom sink. O how the blood swirled from the bote de sangre like a burning whirlpool.  

Unlike my father I cry regularly. I cry over Disney movies. One of the few movies we owned growing up was Bambi. Every time we popped in that VHS tape the first 10 minutes offered me a fresh torture. I put myself in the hooves of the orphan fawn. As the gunshot resounded in my mind, my brother and sister beside me disappeared and I lay in the familiar loneliness, forgetting for a moment who I was and what my tears would mean for me.  

My tears would infuriate my father often leading him to reach for his belt. 

“Llorar es pa’ las viejas.” He’d yell. “Crying is for women.” 

What of me then? I’d ask the crack of leather. 

Despite my father’s performance of invincibility, I knew my parents struggled. Having migrated from Mexico in the early eighties with a sixth and third grade education respectively, my mother and father had limited job opportunities. When I was only one year old my father had an accident at work that damaged his spinal cord. At the time, he worked at a nursery caring for plants. One day he was carrying heavy fertilizer costales and the weight of a lifetime of hard physical labor must have caught up with his body. I can’t recall if he fractured a vertebra or the exact nature of the injury, but it was enough that he had to be hospitalized and placed on disability indefinitely. From then on, he could hardly walk without crutches. From then on, I suspect, he lost the man he had believed himself to be.

As the self-appointed head of household, it was his responsibility to be strong for his family. He was decisive, stubborn, and always had the final say. His control was absolute—except when it wasn’t. In those cases, his rage would crash down upon us like a breaking wave. As a child, I idolized my father and wanted to replicate his stoic, unbreakable brand of masculinity. I inherited my father’s hazel eyes and dark brown hair. Every time someone mentioned that I looked just like my father, part of me would be ecstatic. I saw myself as an extension of my father’s sacrifices. However, those comparisons also emphasized, in my mind, the many ways I fell short of the masculine ideal he expected of me. 

There is a picture of my father in front of a fountain, one leg rests on the railing, his baby blue shirt looks like it was plucked from the water. He wears a smile wider than any I had ever seen on his lips. 

“This is the man I fell in love with,” my mother tells me as we regard the photograph one afternoon. “You look so much like him.” 

Her words burst a dam inside of me. “Yeah, huh.” I respond hurriedly and nearly run into my room and throw myself onto my bed. My mind raced:

Have I ever met the man in that picture? 

Why have I never seen that smile? 

How can I live up to who my father is and who he has been?

My soaked pillow held no answers.  

We lived off my father’s disability check and my mother’s earnings as a housekeeper. My family received food stamps briefly around the time I was in first grade. My parents fought constantly about money and about my father’s restrictions on our movements and actions at home. He spoke Spanish almost exclusively and found it disrespectful if we broke his ban of English at the dinner table.  If I, as bilingual children often do, switched between languages when talking to my siblings, he would yell calling me an “hijo malcriado y malagradecido,” and reminding me whose labor was putting food on the table.   

As the eldest son I was placed in the position of confidant for both my parents. They would come to me with their grievances, the many slights they had perpetrated upon one another. At the time I took this role for granted—it was just another part of being the eldest. My father complained about how my mother’s family hated him. How my grandfather had offered my mom a brand new pick-up truck if she rejected my father’s proposal. My mother resented having to beg to make any purchases like new shoes or clothes for my brother and sister and me. 

“¡Yo soy el hombre de la casa y yo soy quien manda aquí!” My father would yell over my mother’s pleas. 

Once I read my horoscope with my father. The horoscope declared that as a Libra it was my role to bring balance to those around me. After reading that I couldn’t breathe. I asked myself how I could fail to bring balance to my family so spectacularly. I handed my father the newspaper and pointed to my horoscope. 

“No puedo traerle harmonía a mi familia. ¡No puedo!” I told him. He said nothing. I put my head down on the plastic table cover and wanted to disappear. 

Only much later did I realize just how much of a toll it took for me to hold space for these two adults as a child. Only once I shared these experiences with my partner and a few therapists did I realize that not everyone served as a referee nor fielded grievances for their parents. I felt it was my responsibility to hold the pain of my entire family and bring balance to my parents’ relationship, a daunting task for anyone much less a child.

All this was too much for me to hold. I would try as hard as possible to swallow my family’s collective sadness but all too regularly it would burst out. I carried the sadness like a second skin. Throughout elementary school I would cry over seemingly trivial things like someone not laughing at my jokes or being picked last when making teams during recess. I remember taking ‘bathroom’ breaks so I could hide my tears from my classmates. I remember being so frustrated at myself in sixth grade that I invoked la Llorona’s name three times and waited for the bathroom mirror to swallow this unworthy son. My father would yell at me to stop crying if I ever teared up in his presence. I always felt like a failure because of my tears, like it meant I could never become a real man. 

Over the years, I began to cry less and less but my sense that I did not fit the ideal male archetype only grew. I developed coping mechanisms to curb my tears: 

breathing deeply 
pretending to yawn
digging my fingernails into my flesh
making impromptu trips to the bathroom
as a last resort, rage

I imagined myself a whirlpool, trapping all pain into the walls of my sore throat. This containment came at the cost of being unable to speak about the pain. The pain concentrated within my body like a whirling sphere that I could almost touch. My route to coping was to numb myself to every feeling: I muted the sadness but also every moment of joy. 

As I grew older, my father continued to exert his firm grip over my family. However, when I was a senior in high school he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. I could not believe that the same father that had been the arbiter of my life, an infinite source of strength to be revered and feared, could be on the brink of death. As he lay on the hospital bed my father made it a point to lift his hospital blanket and gown to show me his left leg and testicles which had swollen to five times their normal size. That’s when I knew. The doctors gave him a prognosis of one year. I recall sitting in the hospital lobby writing my father a poem about his cancer and my fear for his impending death:

My Father, the strongest in the world

My father worked since he was five years old
Working to support his family
He survived the hardships of life
Crossed into the land of opportunity
Married one of his many admirers
Married my mom
He worked to secure our future
He became disabled at work

My father is an indomitable force
With the mind of a genius
The only thing he needed was opportunity
Which this country did not offer him
But now offers to me

Even though he was disabled
He could knock out anyone
Even Julio César Chávez 
I try to describe his greatness
But I don’t think it is possible
But this is an attempt

I was born 
His clone
Younger by only a few decades
The same eyes, the same hair
The same mind
The same love for our family
He could have been great
He could have been nearly a God
In American eyes
But he had to work for his beloved family
Father, my guide-Father, my God
We love him for it

95 percent pancreatic cancer
Son of God
Divine follower
I am losing him because he is needed in the greatest heights of heaven
I am losing him because God needs him

Instead of a death sentence, the diagnosis appeared to free my father. He started taking regular walks outside. He became more social and relaxed the culture of fear he had cultivated for sixteen years. One day I read him the poem I had written at the hospital. Halfway through I started crying. To my surprise, my father began crying with me. It was only the second time I had ever seen him cry. His vulnerability in that moment is a gift I will always carry with me. Between tears I asked him if he was afraid of dying. He told me he was not afraid because “Yo estoy listo si Diós me necesita”. At the time I thought my father was teaching me how to die, by taking death on head on like a man. Now I think about how much more it would have meant to share in his fear, in the grieving of the milestones in my life he would never get to witness.  

My father’s death left a huge void in my life. I wanted to be him, to take over the mantle of the man of the family. Nevertheless, I was also repulsed by the way he treated my mother, my siblings, and I. Even as I missed and mourned him I began to pull away from what I thought he wanted me to be. I suppressed my anger and vowed to never belittle my partner or children like he had so regularly.

My path to undo my socialization into masculinity has been a difficult one. Five years after my father’s death I had a mental breakdown. I had been taught to disdain going to therapy as a sign of weakness or something only white people did. It was only after my breakdown that I began to take mental health more seriously. With a push from my partner, I went to speak with a therapist. I learned that I had been living with undiagnosed depression for as long as I could remember. Then I took part in a partial hospitalization program. Once I started going to therapy regularly, I began to identify and work through my emotions and quiet the voice telling me I am not enough of a man, that I am not enough. 

In the last few years I have had to contend with my childhood more than ever. As a new father, I want nothing but happiness for my son. Becoming a father myself brought into focus the fact that my childhood did not have to be the way it was. I didn’t have to live in fear or closed off from the outside world. I didn’t have to constantly question my worth or carry the suffering of my family as my own. I am terrified that I will teach my son to be the type of person that cannot share their vulnerability or like me, struggles to identify their own feelings. Now I express my feelings to my son as my attempt to model self-awareness. I let my tears flow when watching My Neighbor Totoro with him or when I catch my son being kind to others. Twin riachuelos feeding into a calm sea. I tell him it's OK for him to have big feelings, and I help him name those feelings. 

“¿Estás triste, mi amor?” I’ll ask my crying child. “¡SIIIIIIII!” his resounding response. “¿Quieres un abrazo?” I’ll follow up seeking his consent to comfort him. “¡SIIIIIIII!” He agrees and I embrace him telling him I’m there for him and he can cry if he wants to.

One of my son’s favorite books to read at bedtime is Tiger Days: A Book of Feelings by M.H. Clark. The book’s pages are filled with vibrant pictures of animals that represent different emotional states. For instance, Clark writes, “On fish days I feel watery, so sad and full of tears. And even if I don’t know why, I just need to sit still and cry.” My son has become adept at identifying his bull days, turtle days, and his tiger days. He has even learned to recognize my emotions.

Recently, my son noticed me staring blankly at the wall of our living room and asked me, “Do you feel sad, papá? Are you having a fish day?” His questions snapped me out of my ruminations. My instinct was to answer, “No, I’m fine.” But that answer would not reflect what he clearly already knew. 

“Yeah, I am feeling a little sad, mi amor. I really miss my dad.” I told him. 
“Do you want a hug?” came his reply.
“Sí, mijo, I would like it very much. Gracias.” I watched the T-rex on my son’s pajamas wrinkle as he wrapped his arms around my neck.   

Explicitly teaching my son emotional self-awareness is only part of the journey. I cannot discard my socialization like a shell I’ve outgrown as it is embedded within me. Especially during times of high stress, I can lose myself to the dark. If I close my eyes, I can see the fear on my son’s face the times my frustration has boiled over and I have yelled at him. In those instances, I have made it a practice to apologize and explain my frustration. For me this serves to highlight the importance of my own continued internal work and accountability. 

I want my son to be aware of my feelings without having to internalize them. I want for my child to form his own gender identity, not be restricted by my sense of masculinity. When my son says, “Estoy feliz, papá” or “I’m very sad” I know this particular darkness, this stagnated emotional life, will end with me. 

About Gustavo Barahona-López

Gustavo Barahona-López is a writer and educator from Richmond, California. In his writing, Barahona-López draws from his experience growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants. He was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West poetry prize and his chapbook "Loss and Other Rivers That Devour" was published by Nomadic Press in 2022. Barahona-López's full-length collection, "Foundation" is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. A member of the Writer's Grotto and a VONA alum, Barahona-López's work can be found or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Apogee Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other publications.