How to Parent a Parent

“Dad, are you ever going to come back home?”

“I don’t know”, he says quietly.

Actions speak louder than words, they say. It has been proven to me time and time again that this cliche is the sad truth. My dad never moved back home. He left me to go back to Jamaica to care for his mother. A few months later he found the “love of his life,” his mom passed, and he got married. I wasn’t invited to the wedding, but I was at the funeral.

About a year ago, the last time I was in Jamaica with my mom and dad at the same time was for my grandma's funeral. This moment brought up emotions for all of us, but the kicker is that we stayed in my dad’s new fiancees house with my dad’s best friend and his cousin. The tension was high. I could tell how uncomfortable my mom felt, but I didn’t know what to do. I hate taking sides when it comes to my parents, but I can’t help but stand with the one woman who has been by my side through all of our hard times. When she was cheated on by the man who's supposed to be an example for me, when practically homeless, going through divorce, and remarried. I can’t help but be by her side whenever I can because she has always been by mine. 

The last day of this trip, we had to go get COVID tests in order to get on our plane. So, my dad drove me and my mom to an outdoor tent to get sticks shoved up our poor nostrils. We could already tell that Christina, the fiancee, had been having some negative feelings towards my mom. While I was getting my test done (aggressively, may I add), my dad picked a fight with my mom saying she threw car keys at Christina. There were no car keys thrown, but he wouldn’t let it go. In the car, I experienced the first real fight that I could remember watching my parents have. My dad in the driver's seat, me as the passenger, and my mom in the back, as they screamed at each other and I cried with the window open trying to grasp a single breath of fresh air.

We got on the plane, me being in tears frantically texting my therapist. I had never experienced such a large mix of emotions in my whole life.

Sajato Jarrett is the only other person in my family with whom I get to share my last name. My dad is one of the most charming, goofy, and adventurous people you will ever meet. When I think of my dad, I think of the time he took me from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway, in an empty train car, shook a bottle of slightly old, room temperature Coca-Cola, and opened it on the otherwise silent train. The bottle spewed open, covering the poles, seats, and ground in the sticky substance. We burst out in laughter for the rest of the ride. I remember thinking about how much happiness my dad brought me. He made me laugh until I almost peed my pants and took me on adventures with absolutely no plan. There is always a ton of laughter when it comes to him. Any time we are in public together, I find myself folding over, struggling to breathe in the middle of the New York City streets, begging him to stop doing whatever it is he is doing to embarrass me. This is one of the reasons I like to say now that he is more like a friend than a dad.

My mom is my best friend, but in a very different way. My mother is the type of person to listen to me rant about boy problems for forever, letting me cry in her arms until I find the courage to drag myself into a warm shower. She will sit and take my pain unto herself. I never feel alone with my mom; it has been the two of us for my whole life. She is the only person I can say has been by my side through all obstacles that life has thrown at both of us. She is another person that I feel like makes me laugh just as much as my dad does. That’s something that I know they loved about each other, that they could make each other laugh and make me laugh. My mom dances around the kitchen dancing and making up her own songs about whatever she feels at that moment. She cannot dance or sing for her life, which is why these moments make me crack up until I nearly pee myself. 

Another critical thing to know about my mother is that she is the most selfless person on this planet. She spent hours up at night doing extensive research about the rare side effects that my sister had to an allergy, and my rare condition called Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections, or PANDAS. PANDAS is a condition that causes inflammation in the brain that leads to extreme anxiety, superstitions, depression, tourette’s-like symptoms, and more. It played a major role in my life growing up. My sister and I would not be here if we didn’t have a mother who lost sleep trying to figure out what was wrong with us, or woke up any time she heard either of us tip-toeing into her room at three A.M. Above all of these other qualities, the one that is most personal to me is that while I was growing up, my mom always tried her hardest to keep a good relationship with my dad for me. She got remarried, had another baby, and kept him in our life through it all. 

My father joined my family for holidays like Christmas, but also for random Wednesday night dinners, after driving me 45 minutes to and from gymnastics practice. My family functioned in a unique manner. As far as I know, most so-called “broken families” don’t have dinner with all people involved in the awkward situation sitting at the same table. However, this was my normal. It was normal for me to watch movies with all of these humans who were brought together in an uncomfortably odd way, on the same big, gray, deep seated couch in front of our flatscreen TV, together. 

I never wanted to admit it, but I subconsciously knew that the fact that my dad would bring me into the liquor store with him at age four and feed me nothing but marshmallow cereal (which I would never complain about) showed me the kind of dad he is, and the only kind of dad he was able to be. I don’t remember the exact moment, month, or year my dad left for Jamaica. I don’t remember saying bye to him, I just remember the confusion I felt once he was no longer a part of my life in the same way. It had always felt like Dad had a valid excuse to leave me. He had moved in the first place in order to help his mom who was sick with cancer for the sixth time in her life. After she passed, he didn’t have such a good excuse anymore. 

Especially no good one for moving to Austria. 

He left for Austria in June with his wife and made sure to make it not feel like a big deal, and I followed by convincing myself the same. 

All of the moments he said “I love you shnooks” every single morning, or “Naiyah, you know you’re my world, right?” began to feel a little bit fake. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the back of a stinky Uber with my father shortly before he left for Jamaica, as he would rant to me about how much he loves me and tears rolled down his cheeks. I sat and listened, but all that I could think about was how bad he was making me feel. How I somehow felt guilty, weird, and uncomfortable when he spoke to me like this. I have never let him know that. I learned how to build boundaries in a way that I never have been able to before. A switch in my brain had finally flipped. I began to realize that I am allowed to love him and appreciate when he buys me a new pair of Air Jordans, but I have to enable myself to be mad. I’m allowed to be frustrated that he cheated on my mom, and I’m allowed to be mad that he keeps moving farther and farther away from “his heart” while acting like it is no big deal.

I never asked. I knew that he had faults, bad ones, but I refused to let myself ask anything about it. I had to learn the hard way, the way that gave me abandonment issues that I didn’t realize were apparent until recently when my mom started to peel away small pieces of his hidden truth bit by bit  I saw the guilt in her eyes when she did. She once told me about a time when I was about four years old and she picked me up from staying over at dad’s. “How was it?” She questioned. “It was good,” I say. As the car rolls right by to the liquor store, I spit out the words: “The nice man in there always gives me candy!”. Hearing that story jogged the memory that I had been ignoring for years. The memory of my dad being an alcoholic and thinking I was too young to notice. The problem is, I was too young to notice. Even being told these stories, I still empathize with my dad just like my mom did. I understand that he is not a perfect human being, but no one is, right? 

I wish I could say I have learned how to deal with my feelings around my dad or what those feelings even are, but I can’t. I have never had a conversation with him about anything I have just shared with you. I have never been able to confront him and tell him my feelings without so much fear that my palms are sweaty and my breath gets heavy. I’ve spent my whole life and several hours of therapy trying to build up to a moment when I can confront him about everything, but I have never been able to bring myself to do it.