I wrote it in a note in my simple Spanish (at the time, I was nowhere near the level of fluent I am now), I wrote: "Papá, para este cumpleaños yo no quiero nada, ningún regalo ni ropa ni nada, sólo quiero que me diga 'Te amo'" (Dad, for my birthday I don't want anything else, no gifts or clothing, nothing, I just want you to tell me you love me).
You might wonder, why would I ask him that? Growing up, my dad wasn't an affectionate man. Not really, at least. He used to hit me, just like he hit all my other siblings, and so there was a degree of fear involved. There were his constant admonitions to 'be a man' and 'los machos no lloran' (men don't cry), which in hindsight is a pretty ludicrous thing to say to someone when you're hitting them for the slightest offense. I also got the sense growing up that I wasn't enough, enough of a boy, not manly enough, I wasn't a jock constantly playing sports, I liked them but not to the same extent as my dad. I got the feeling that he thought I was gay because I spent so much time with my best friend Jason. How did I know? At around the age of 15, I renounced my Catholicism in front of my assembled family on the grounds that I felt it couldn't be the only correct religion thus not being right for me, so how could I devote myself to it? My dad's first question was, "Are you gay?!". I was furious at him in that moment, I couldn't understand his logic, I couldn't understand how he couldn't listen to what I was truly saying. I went back to school the next day and told Jason all about it, Jason was mortified and exclaimed, "oh man, you're dad thinks I'm gay", to which I soothingly replied, "don't worry, he thinks I'm gay too".
There was the drinking, the frustration, my dad was a walking powder keg, one second he could be smiling and laughing and the next he could fly into a rage, yelling at the top of his lungs. It was this mixture of love and rage that I think confused me, how can you love a person that you strike? Now, I've come to terms with that in the sense that it's something from the past and I won't hold it against my parents, especially my dad (since he was the enforcer and I can count on my hand the number of times my mom hit me). I can reconcile that as an adult but how do you make sense of it as a child? You can't, I couldn't, I had all these question marks and no straight answers and so I decided to ask something small of my dad, a gesture.
When my birthday rolled around, he said that he'd read my note, looked in my eyes and said, "te quiero". I knew this meant something affectionate but it doesn't literally mean 'I love you' in Spanish, it literally means 'I want you' but to a teen who learned Spanish speaking with his family and not having had a formal education in the language it sounded like a cop out. It sounded like another disappointment. It sounded like, "I'm not capable of saying 'I love you', here, take this instead".
It wasn't until years later that I learned that 'te quiero' is just as good as saying 'te amo', it's more common in fact. And it wasn't until then that I realized that my dad loved me all along, it was just lost in translation.
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