Wedding

Two days before my wedding, a day that is supposed to be the best and most magical day of my life, I spent it crying inconsolably. I was sitting alone on a bench at the park right in front of my grandmother’s apartment, surrounded by chickens, trying to get a tan so my skin wouldn’t look so pale against the white wedding dress. That’s when my cousin texted me. As soon as I saw her name pop up on my phone, my heart accelerated, and in a matter of seconds, my body was overwhelmed by a sense of dread. The exact feeling that I was trying to soothe under the hot, Puerto Rican sun while listening to the roosting of the chickens. She never officially told me that she wasn’t going to attend my wedding, but she didn’t need to say those words explicitly for me to know. She did tell me, though, that I was making the worst decision of my life, a decision that I would always regret, and that my paternal grandmother, who is no longer in this world, would have been very disappointed in me. 

I should have been excited that in just a couple of days, I would officially be marrying the love of my life and his beautiful family. See, my fiancé was not perfect, but he was perfect for me, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world that he chose me to be his life partner. Instead, I was overwhelmed with grief, confusion, and guilt, as everyone from my dad’s side of my family assumed the worst of me and abandoned me. How could they discard me so easily, as if I meant nothing to them? All these people who raised me and loved me, or so I thought, turned their backs on me. I was living my worst nightmare, rejected by my own family and erased like I never existed. If an ultimatum was given, their decision was made, and they chose my father over me. Even the Taino sun that usually heals and comforts me could not console me at that moment. The wound was just too deep. 

This mess started three months prior, but if I am honest, it really began about a hundred years ago. I come from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, and I was raised with a strong connection to my family and my ancestors. I’ve never met my great-grandmother, the mother of my father’s mom, but this story begins with her. She came from an elite, wealthy Spanish family in Puerto Rico. But my great-grandmother fell in love with someone whom her parents did not approve of because he was Black. In Puerto Rico, we are mostly a mix of three specific races and ethnicities: Spaniards, Taino Indians, and Africans, mostly from West Africa. Unlike other Caribbean islands, there was a lot of intermingling and mixing between these three races. This is one of the beautiful and unique characteristics of Puerto Rican identity and culture. We are a truly diverse blend of these three races, and we take great pride in our diverse ancestral heritage. But just because we are a proud mix of Spanish, Taino, and African blood does not mean that we are void of racism; there is a clear yet unspoken hierarchy that is very real on our island, and one that we have never fully confronted or even acknowledged as a country. Anti-blackness is omnipresent in our culture, but it’s also subtle and nuanced. The unfortunate remnants of slavery and colonialism that our island has endured. 

When my great-grandmother married this man, her family made the drastic decision to disown her. She didn’t stay married to him for very long, and soon she found herself to be a single mother raising two girls on her own with no money and no family or husband to support her. As she hustled to make a living, she ended up becoming an espiritista and would become well-known on the island for her gift of healing others. Unfortunately, history usually repeats itself unless we consciously and actively destroy our toxic cycles, and four generations later, the same thing happened to me; my family disowned me for marrying a Black man. 

My great-grandmother and I were more connected than I ever imagined; our journeys were intertwined in ways that could transcend time and space. Now, I understand why she held such a strong presence in my heart and soul from the moment that I was born. We are united in our grief, our displacement, our loss, and in our decision to choose ourselves and to choose whom we love over antiquated and rigid cultural, social, and familial norms that were thrust upon us. She gave me strength in those moments when I didn’t know if I could get myself up because she had paved the way and walked the path that I was currently embarking on. 

Although it may seem that this story is straightforwardly about racism, I assure you it is not. It is a lot more complex than that, like all human stories. This story is also about power, colonization, patriarchy, and mental health. The threads of Puerto Rican culture and history weave through my narrative, illuminating the intricate interplay of identity, trauma, and resilience that have shaped my life and that of my family. 

The story now shifts focus to my father. The internalized racism that lived within the González family would not have been awoken so easily and so destructively if it weren’t for my father’s unique and powerful gift of manipulation. My father is a brilliant man, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. He was a successful entrepreneur, a talented tennis player, and thrived as a physician, not just in Puerto Rico, but also in Massachusetts, the number one state for healthcare. He reached the highest levels professionally, academically, and socially at home on our small island and in the United States, a country that treats us as if we have nothing to contribute, no value to add, but rather resources to extract. This success, coupled with his larger-than-life personality and charisma, placed him as the patriarch in our family. 

A lot more is forgiven and excused when we feel like we owe something to someone, and we were all drowning in debt to my father. My dad, as someone with narcissistic personality disorder, of course, not officially diagnosed but labeled by my various therapists, carefully controlled us all as if we were puppets in his grandiose life. I always knew he was abusive to me and to others, but I wasn’t aware of the extent of the power he held over all of us, like a dark cloud whose air was so thick and humid, slowing and subconsciously impacting every breath that we take. His talent for emotional abuse is truly impressive; he had a pure gift for creating worlds that never existed until he molded, twisted, and contorted them in our minds, making them so real that we didn’t even remember what was there previously.  

I was the only daughter of my father, the baby, the golden child. As I reflect, I feel sad for that little girl. She was so naive, so vulnerable, and so exposed that no one could, or no one dared, to protect her from his chaos. I was available for his pleasure, his control, his ego. Whenever I thought about my wedding, I would replay every interaction over and over in my head, trying to analyze what I said or what I did that triggered my dad to convince the whole family to go against me. I always thought it was my fault, and if I were better, a better daughter, then I could have prevented what happened. But as I sit here, forty years old, ten years since my wedding, ten years estranged from my dad’s side of the family, I realize there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome. This wasn’t my fault. My dad is a sick man, and he couldn’t bear the sight of me marrying someone who wasn’t him. Now, I have found my voice, and this is my story.