The complicated thing about family

is that it is always difficult for them to accept that you are no longer a child. Most of the time, as anyone who knows me can probably tell you, I resent being the youngest because it gives you all the responsibility of being independent ("be a big girl, take care of yourself") and all the pressure of acting like a child--why is it, for instance that whenever my dad talks to me I must always resort to acting like I don't know anything about men or that I still care about whether or not a guy buys me flowers? I don't. But there will be friction once he realizes that even his baby is no longer a baby.

When my sister was home last Christmas, she semi-ambushed me with a sex talk and while I really appreciated the effort, I remember thinking--why now, at 21? Why not when I was 16 and lying on the bed with my ex-boyfriend who tried to strangle me? Or when I was 17 and someone who I thought was my dear friend stabbed me with a burning cigarette while he was high? Why not when I was 18 and convincing another ex-boyfriend not to kill himself? Heck, why not last year? Why now? And the answer came to me this afternoon: probably because 21 is an age where you can't pretend-away anymore. You can't classify a 21-year-old as an adolescent anymore.

Tomorrow my dad is going to meet Keavin for the first time since my 21st birthday party (which I don't think you can consider "meeting", exactly). I told him tonight that Keav and I are together and my dad looked like he was going to give me a sermon. And then he stopped and I think he realized what I realized: there was nothing he could say that was going to change my mind. My parents fell in love with my past two boyfriends and they're always so concerned with the petty things, it seems: bakit ikaw pupunta dun? bakit hindi siya pumunta dito?

What about understanding? What about being able to talk to someone about anything and everything? What about those things? What about someone caring about you and loving you so much that you feel like for the first time you're going to break not from someone hurting you or trying to get you to be someone you're not but from someone seeing you.

But they don't know these things. I cannot say these things because I am not someone with an opinion. I am their baby and I have to make them smile by being cheerful or naive. When I was in Prep, my teacher wrote in my year book "acts and talks like an adult". Ah, if she could see me now.

It makes me so sad sometimes. And I think I let them treat me like a child because it is less complicated. I hate hurting people's feelings. But also, we can't pretend forever. When we are adolescents we get to know our parents as people--that they had sex to have us, that they weren't always faithful, whatever--and that always seems difficult. But even more difficult than that seems to be them seeing us as people because it always comes tainted with a sort of malice--if they could afford it, I think they would like us to be dependent on them forever.

My dad is coming to Conspiracy tomorrow--and I've got two poems to read: one about fucking, the other about smoking. Huh. What to do, what to do.

I am tired of lying though.

When I was 12, my dad and I were eating at a carenderia and he lit up a cigarette in front of me for the first time in a couple of years.

"You know why I'm smoking in front of you?" he asked.

"Why?"

"I want you to love me for who I am. I don't want you to think Daddy's perfect and get mad when you find out he's not."

I nodded then, but I think it's taken me all this time to understand what he truly meant. I can only hope for the same understanding.