Expectant father ponders family past and future

Expectant father ponders family past and future
by Rodolpho Carrasco
April 29, 2000
in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group
[ Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena. Email him at rudy@qvo.cc

As I stood at the bottom of a staircase, talking to my friends Melvin and Charisse, their daughter descended. I had seen her the year before, when she was just entering high school. Now the sight of her struck fear into my heart. "What if my daughter turns out like her?" I thought.

Turning out like her would mean smart, beautiful, and exuding an attractive vitality that is like honey to bees. Only in this case the bees are hormonally-charged teenage boys.

My wife Kafi and I are expecting our first child, a girl, before June, but when I saw their daughter I didn't think of what my cute little baby could become. All that registered was the fact that hundreds of teenage boys of questionable maturity and intentions would one day "check out" my little Zenzele.

Melvin and I retreated into the kitchen, where I asked, "What do you do with your daughter? What about all the guys chasing her?"

Thank God, Melvin felt the pain in my questions. He proceeded to calmly talk me out of locking up my daughter in a third-floor bedroom, forbidding her to talk to boys until college, and restricting her to long-sleeved shirts and ankle length dresses.

His crowning point brimmed with wisdom: "We have to trust that she has learned what we've taught her, that she understands what God intends for her, and that she will make the right decisions."

The specter of an attractive teen-age daughter is not the only shadowboxing I've done during my wife's pregnancy. Just like Jacob wrestled the Angel in the biblical book of Genesis, this Dad-to-be has struggled against various emotional and spiritual apparitions.

Late one night I sat listening to a song on the Alanis Morissette "Unplugged" CD. The song, Princes Familiar, was catchy, but I couldn't figure out the words. The CD jacket said that song lyrics are available at Alanis' web site, so I logged on to the Internet and dug up the lyrics.

When I finally uncovered the words, tears began dripping down my cheeks. One line said: "Papa respect your princess so that she will find/respectful princes familiar." The meaning is clear: The treatment a father gives to his daughter is the treatment she is likely to seek, as something familiar and comfortable, from other men. Respect your daughter and she is likely to seek out respectful guys. Abuse your daughter and she is likely to seek out abusers.

The vision of my daughter falling for some knucklehead prompted me to take a long, hard look at myself. Honest introspection is usually difficult, but in tears and with purpose, it wasn't that hard.

Another phantom has emerged that doesn't allow such a direct response.

The phantom came in the form of my picture inside a Bible. I wrote an introduction for a version of the New Testament that targets multiethnic young people, and they put my name and picture inside. A friend of mine gave this Bible to the youth pastor at his church in Montebello. This youth pastor took hold of this New Testament, flipped through the pages, saw my photo, and said, "Hey, this guy has the same last name as me."

It turns out that this youth pastor is my half-brother. He didn't recognize me because we've never met.

He is the product of my father's marriage. I am the product of an affair our father had with my mother. We've never met because of the deep pain our father's affair with my mother caused for both families.

Toward making amends with his wife and kids, my father agreed to cut off la otra mujer (the other woman). My mother, who was a single mother, never recovered, dying a few years later.

Though my father and his family lived here in the San Gabriel Valley, never more than 30 minutes from me, I never knew him. He died when I was in high school. A few years back I contacted my father's daughter, my half-sister. She reluctantly met with me for a few minutes, but dared not tell her mother or brother about our meeting.

Our mutual friend, without realizing the connection, opened a 30-year-old wound. He told my half-brother that the youth outreach program I co-direct "is great and you should visit them. Rudy's a cool guy. He. . ." at which point our friend tells my whole family history and my half-brother begins to put two and two together.

I don't know how this story will end. Despite the incredible providence of my half-brother's discovery, I'm still the only person from either family to ever approach the other side. On my side of the family, there remains deep hurt and pain, and little interest in striking up a relationship. There is little clue as to what my father's family will do, if anything.

I think about all these things as I rub my wife's belly and talk to my baby Zenzele, feeling her kicks as I await her grand entrance.

The copyright for these materials are owned by Rudy Carrasco.  These materials were use with permission by TechMission