Opinion 51 | Guest Column

Absence in the first person

Like mine, 11 million Mexican households have an absent father.

Father's Day, like every year for me, tends to be fleeting and unnoticed. In addition to not being as commercial and crippling as Mother's Day, the answer to why it doesn't achieve that level of popularity, I think, is because, like mine, 11 million Mexican households have an absentee father.

However, I have to say that this one was a little different. The first reason was a personal one that I will detail later and the second was collective: a reading that at the same time encouraged many of us to write.

Alma Delia Murillo 's name was already known to me. And although I admit I had not read any of her books, her columns had caught my attention for some time, but not as much as when I saw on social networks the bottom cover of her recent novel La cabeza de mi padre and I knew I wanted to read it because for the first time I saw something that made me feel identified.

It is not that I had never read any text where there were absent fathers and that although Alma Delia says that we are a daughter nation of Pedro Páramo, with all my apologies to Juan Rulfo, this book brought me closer to my experiences and I saw embodied in many words -now underlined- what I have often thought and felt. And although I have talked about my father with many people, the closest dialogue in my almost 30 years has been with this novel that encouraged me to write for the first time part of my own story of absence.

The question "why don't we children of absent fathers talk about this?" began to invade me page by page and in a therapy session I got another question that somehow solved this issue: do we avoid it because it makes us uncomfortable or because we make others uncomfortable?

Doing a little review with friends in music and books, mainly, the absence of the father is there, but like an elephant in the room, and this led me to have a brief but pleasant talk with the author.

For Alma Delia Murillo, the lack of direct references to the absence of a father in cultural products has to do with the collective projection of the fantasy of the "perfect family", educated for generations from the Church, politics, marketing where this perfection is composed of mom, dad and children, so it is very difficult to put the emotions on the table that have to do with our origin to say "a part is missing".

In the song Pa' dónde se fue, Mon Laferte speaks directly to her father, who was absent for more than 10 years: "What did I do wrong, why did I lose you? Knowing that you grow old out there", says a fragment. At the time of writing this I see that the song has more than 32 million reproductions, it is the third most popular of the singer. At the same time, La cabeza de mi padre reached its third release a few days ago, less than two months after being published.

In my eyes there is a very quick conclusion to its popularity:representation was necessary. It may sound paradoxical, but it is comforting to hear a song that asks the father why he left or to read in a novel how tedious it can be to fill out forms that don't have a "my dad left me" section, but ask you about his age, address, health or academic history, which you don't know. It is comforting because you see that you are not alone.

Talking about the absence in the first person is not an attempt to victimize us, it is telling out loud a story that is repeated in millions and that generates apathy, resentment, pain, many emotions that need to find a way out. It is to seek that when you say you don't have a father, they don't have to change the conversation "so as not to make you uncomfortable" or remind you -with good intentions, of course- of the fortune of having other people in your family. We know.

"We do not know what to do with emotions that do not show a happy face, the networks have contributed to that. It is a fascinating topic the emotional discourse in the public, in the collective and in the private how rejected it is, the way we run away from it".

It has been a few years since I was finally able to talk about him, with only a few people, mainly my therapist. I shamelessly said that when I came of age I went looking for him with my friends and then alone, but I was unsuccessful. A year ago I succeeded in finding his picture on the internet, I met his face and now I live with the peace of mind of one less enigma.

"I'm a seeker. I have the curse, what am I going to do?".

Literature and cultural products tend to do just that: move our emotions, while, on the contrary, the usual note that is only published on the third Sunday of June with inconclusive figures of households without a father does not move us at all.

Alma Delia rightly points out: in a country as sexist as Mexico, in a certain way it is allowed for fathers to abandon their children, since they have no consequences, they simply disappear without social or legal persecution, as women are persecuted in so many things such as abortion, for example.

"The mother who abandons is considered diabolical, unnatural, almost a demonic being. How is this possible? If the nature of every woman should be to be a protective mother. On the other hand, the father has this tacit permission to abandon, so it seems that it is not so relevant (to talk about absence)".

Are other narratives possible?

"When a first person dared to take a step and say 'it happened to me', another one said 'to me too' and then another one. So it's a little bit this resonance that telling the stories has, it makes you feel that you are not the only one and I think there is in that we tell how this is, what is the real family that is beating in the heart of Mexico, which is a family like ours, incomplete, imperfect, deeply human, with much strength, with much pain, and that this has a space and that we do not continue to see the model of mom, dad, little children that made us feel ashamed for so many years."

Is it time to change the narrative? I would say yes.