Half A Century For Tido

In a faraway place today, in Cape Verde today, my dad turned 50. It is officially the first time I feel any of my parents have a bonafide grown up age that I can share with the world. My whole life my parents had the "obscenely young" thing going on. My mother's 46--I'm thirty, yes it was legal in Cape Verde at the time. Or rather, it didn't matter. Or rather, it wasn't illegal. Anyways, they got married and did the whole wedlock thing. Not that it helped any of us three to try and be a nuclear family. Growing up with them was like sharing a college dorm with your two older siblings. For the first 6 years, we were in fact, in a college dorm situation, although it was a very tiny duplex, in a college town in Belgium. Having licked my wounds in that regard, having super young parents is cool now. Fun. The space between 30 and 40 (the new 30!) and 50 (the new 40!) gets to be minimal in many ways and in a profound way, the fact that they and I can cover common ground now makes up for a lot of fucked shit in the past. People with fucked up childhoods and parents who fuck up never get over it. It's not in the plan that you would get over it--just like I guess one doesn't get over DNA. Fucked up childhoods are like emotional DNA, in a way. Inheritance. A concerted effort to re-invent the relationship with the parent once you're strong enough--enough to deal with them without further bruising yourself up against their issues (not easily done at all)--can be very rewarding. If you come to that task having had a child yourself then it's even more rewarding. On the one hand, now that you are a parent, you realize you can never forgive them for some of the shit they did, but on the other hand you realize, from the places inside your motherhood, that when we are busy passing judgment on humanity, humanity just happens. Your parents--the bastards, monsters, manipulators, cruel inflicters of hours and hours of therapy that they are--are just as human as you are. And as a parent you too become just as humanly capable of fucking up as they were. And if you sit with that, and you look them in the eye, there is a familiarity there that is central to your existence. Whenever a person can catch a glimpse of where they came from and find that thread, even through all the bullshit, then the world is good that day. So despite a HUGELY significant amount of stuff between us, today I was in a position to genuinely get excited about my dad's birthday and call him and share in that moment in his life. Having turned 30, I think I finally grew up, and today, he says, so does he. (A cool aside is that I am the spitting image of my father, in physical appearance, for better (great legs without playing the soccer he plays!) and for worse (chubby belly without drinking all the beer he does), as well as temperament: my dad likes things nice and easy and preferably, very funny. I get my charm from him. I love my father. His name is Jose Carlos Santos Monteiro, a.k.a. Tido, and he is 50 today.