Anxiety

“Hey papá,” he says, walking out of his room with his face in his phone, “you think you can drive me to the store?”

Here we go again. What is it this time? Out of vapes? Or maybe he’s craving a 40? Drives me insane. Don’t know what to do. How to change it. I want to change it, but he’s so impossible. Where did it go wrong? Jesus Christ, my life was much harder than his and I dealt with so much more shit, and it didn’t turn me into a lazy bum. Why can’t he get his act together?

“What for?” I say.

“You know,” he says.

I do know. “I thought you were quitting.”

“I am, I am,” he says.

“Yeah, when?”

“Soon,” he says. He walks up behind me as I sit at my computer and places both hands on my shoulders.

“You’ve been saying that for months,” I say, then, unable to stop, I add, “just like you’ve been saying that you’ll clean up, help out in the house, get a job, you know, all that.”

His hands fall off my shoulder.

“Can you just take me, please?”

“Why don’t you just quit now? Cold turkey.” I turn my chair to face him.

His face is back in his phone. He makes some sort of I-don’t-know sound as he shrugs.

“And what if I can’t take you? What about that?”

“Then I’ll be in a shitty mood all night and probably won’t sleep and stay up all night thinking about all sorts of things that freak me out and bother me.”

He’s about to retreat. Maybe I should stop before it gets out of hand. It’s gotten out of hand so many times I’ve lost count. And nothing has changed.

“Well,” I say, then pause. Should I? I know I shouldn’t, but for some reason, I just do it anyway, “then maybe you should just walk over there. It isn’t that far.” I think about the two mile walks I had to take at three in the morning because the bus service no longer ran by the time I got off work when I was his age.

“Great,” he says, letting out a long, unnecessarily loud sigh, “so you’re ok with your skinny white-looking son who is always getting picked on to go walking in the dark in this neighborhood. You okay with that? Really?” He turns towards his room.

“No, no, of course not,” I say. The thought of him being in danger frightens me instantly and I see a flash of him getting beaten and robbed on the streets. He’s right. He’s not like me in that regard. Not that I’m much bigger or imposing. But I’m darker and don’t stick out in New Domangue. I look like I belong, where he looks like a small white kid out of place.

He stops and turns around, then sighs deeply while he asks, “so will you take me then?”

I let out my own exaggerated sigh. Maybe he got that from me. I don’t know. It feels like I do that a lot lately. When I’m around him, I sigh. When I’m away from him, I sigh. Sometimes, at work, a coworker will ask me if I’m okay and I’ll just say, “yeah, I’m fine, just thinking about my troubles with my twenty-one-year-old.”

“Say no more,” they would say and enter into a dissertation about their own troubles with their offspring.

My Dominican ancestors would be turning in their graves. Hell, I know what my living family thinks of my fathering. They say I spoil him. It’s my fault he turned out this way. I got no one to blame but me. Mamá says “que lo añoñé,” which basically means I turned him into a sissy good-for-nothing bum, since birth. I think it’s more complicated than that. I know it’s more complicated than that. Three years of therapy got us at least to the point where my son doesn’t think I hate him. I had no clue he saw it this way until it surfaced in counseling. That’s all we accomplished in those early sessions before he asked to end them. At least he learned that I never stopped loving him, that I love him still. I wish we could go back to counseling.

I’m trying to offer the best I can that wasn’t offered me, and I’m finding it insufficient. I cry a lot about it. I want to cry right now just thinking about how he hasn’t yet been able to fully engage the adult world, living the majority of his days as if he were a fifteen-year-old who can legally get drunk in a bar. I never suspected that those years with his mom, after our divorce, that they would have caused such damage. But they did. He thought I hated him because I only saw him on weekends. Then she turned out to be the worst kind of mother, the type who thinks she can hide how much she dislikes the child she gave birth to and cover it with birthday gifts and cash, but she can’t. He saw through it years ago. I just don’t know when. Was it before he came to live with me, or after? It’s been so much of this routine that it all blurs. I wish things were different. I wish he would just one day say, hey papá, you know what, you’ve been right all along. I just needed to get a better perspective to see that things aren’t as hard as I make them to be. Don’t worry, papá, I’ve got this. I’m going to get better and get a job, and get a car. You’ll see.

But that’s not today. I do hold out hope for that day. I look forward to that day, the day he breaks free.

I get up from my chair and move to grab the car keys, “ok, hijo, let’s go.”