< oh boy >

   (First off, today is the third year anniversary of The Marocharim Experiment.  Yup, it's been three years.  As much as I would like to write about three years of Marocharim today, I would postpone celebratory entries for next time, when I'm in a better mood.  Today, I'd like to talk about something more personal.  P.S.  Happy TMX Day.)

   As a matter of "policy," I don't write about my family here.  These are times, though, when I just can't help it: when the dam that I've tried to keep strong has burst.  It's a dam - perhaps even a damn - that I've always had for my father.

   No, I don't hate my father.  As a child, I've always looked up to him as a man with the strength of an ox and the heart of a lion.  I idolized my father.  Whenever relatives come by, they compliment me on how much I am the spitting image of my father.  Yet as we both grew older, the road got rockier.  If anything, two spitting images of each other are coming so close to spitting at each other's images.

   I have nothing against my father, but he has every axe to grind against me.  The kind of shame my father always rants about is that his children failed to graduate on time.  My self-respect dwindles every time he humiliates me and my siblings for "failing him."  The weekends he spends at home are no longer fun times, but a life spent in Hell for me.  I can't bear to give my own father a piece of my mind: as much as he cannot stand his failure for a son, I cannot stand that shell of a shadow of a man that is my father.

   The soonest that my father lost pride in me, I've sought every measure in the world that there is to earn his pride back.  I wanted my father's respect so bad that if I can't earn it, I was going to take it.  But I realized that can no longer happen: my father is a man who has shown his true colors to me: as good a provider as he is, it becomes a business of owing.  The love that he always professes is nothing more than a ledger of debts I've racked up in 22 years of burnout and failure.

   It's now that I realized and recognized that my desperate search for his respect is in vain, that in a way, I've lost respect for myself in the process.  I'm in no position to please my father because nothing I do will please him.  Ever.  Everything I do will only be counteracted by the cons that he will think up if you give him five minutes.

   Yet at the back of my mind, I see my father: his sickly form, his propensity nowadays to be profane, the fact that he shouted at my siblings.  Maybe he has every right to do so.  Maybe he's got every right to cry out to the heavens for having no shoes, when the rest of the world has no feet.  Maybe I should put every complaint and sickness I also have because my father thinks he's entitled to complain.  I'm anything like what I see in my father right now.

   As much as I still love my father, it's about time I started doing things not for my father's respect, but because I want to earn my own respect.  It won't be in the name of the father anymore.