Before there was me, there was already a story.

Or maybe a mess.

Most of what I know about the beginning of my parents’ relationship was not something I witnessed, obviously. It came to me in pieces over the years. An uncle would mention something. My grandmother would say something else. A cousin might know another version. My grandfather may have talked about it too.

I honestly cannot remember who told me what anymore.

But the story itself came up enough times that certain parts stayed with me.

My father, my biological father, spent some time in a seminary when he was young.

The original version in my head was that he had gone there after college, but even as I try to reconstruct this now, I realize that cannot be right. My mother later worked while he continued his university studies, so the seminary must have come earlier—probably after high school.

That is the thing about memory.

Sometimes you begin telling a story convinced that you remember it correctly, and halfway through telling it you realize two pieces cannot possibly fit together.

So you stop.

You move them around.

You try again.

What I do know is that my paternal grandmother was apparently very focused on the idea that one of her children should become a man of God.

My father became the candidate.

So, for some period of time, he entered the seminary and began moving toward the priesthood.

Apparently, seminarians were occasionally allowed to leave.

During one of those times away, he met my mother.

She was young too.

She was studying languages—English, French, that kind of thing—and this would have been somewhere around the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The exact year I do not know yet.

They met.

They fell in love.

At least that is the version of the story that survived.

And whatever plans existed for my father to become a priest disappeared.

Civilian life, apparently, had made a convincing argument.

He left the seminary.

He proposed to my mother.

They got married.

And almost exactly nine months later, I was born.

That is the romantic version.

Young man preparing for the priesthood meets young university student, falls in love, abandons one life for another, gets married, starts a family.

It almost sounds sweet when you reduce it to those facts.

But they did not arrive at that marriage as two blank human beings.

They brought people with them.

Their parents.

Their childhoods.

Their habits.

Their ideas about discipline.

Their ideas about authority.

Their anger.

And, unfortunately, some of those things would eventually reach me.

Both of my grandmothers came from a version of parenting where pain and discipline seemed to live very close to each other.

Belts.

Chanclas.

Hands.

Whatever happened to be available.

There was also a particular kind of electrical cord I remember from the old irons people used back then. Thick. Wrapped in some kind of heavy woven material. A little more than a centimeter across, if my memory is right.

It was not a small cable.

And it hurt.

I know because years later I would feel one against my own body.

More than once.

Those were the kinds of objects that could become instruments of discipline in those houses.

A child broke a rule.

A child disobeyed.

A child talked back.

Pain followed.

That was the system.

My understanding is that both my mother and my father grew up inside some version of that system.

They were hit.

They were slapped.

They were struck with objects.

Faces were apparently fair game.

And from everything I have heard, none of this was treated as some extraordinary family catastrophe.

It was discipline.

Or at least that is what people called it.

Pain administered by the people who loved you because supposedly they were teaching you how to behave.

That was the inheritance.

Not money.

Not property.

Not some precious family heirloom passed carefully from one generation to the next.

A method.

When somebody does something wrong, make it hurt.

My parents would later develop their own versions of it.

Especially my mother.

She could be unbelievably physical.

When she became angry, whatever happened to be close enough could become part of the punishment.

An object in her hand.

Something sitting nearby.

Something she could grab.

I remember that very clearly.

But that belongs further ahead in the story.

For now, these are the prehistoric facts.

This is what existed before I did.

Two very young people coming from homes where physical punishment was normal, carrying whatever wounds came with that, getting married while they were barely adults themselves.

My father was probably somewhere around twenty-two or twenty-three.

My mother might have been twenty-one or twenty-two.

I am not completely certain about the ages.

What I am certain about is that they were young.

Very young.

My mother never finished the degree she had started.

She went to work full-time.

As I remember the story, part of that was so my father could continue his own university education. Mathematics was involved. Physics may have been involved as well. That is another detail I want to eventually verify rather than pretending I remember perfectly.

And somewhere underneath all of this was another conflict already waiting for them.

My father's mother had wanted a priest.

Instead, her son came home with a woman.

Then he married her.

I do not imagine that transition helped anything.

From the beginning, the relationship between my paternal grandmother and my mother was terrible.

My mother's mother was not exactly waiting on the other side with emotional wisdom and open arms either.

She was extremely hot-headed.

Hard.

Physical.

When I was a child, being around her could be miserable.

She was the kind of person whose understanding of children seemed to begin with obedience.

Everything else came later.

Much later.

Interestingly, she changed as she got older.

Eventually—when she was already somewhere in her sixties, as I remember it—she seemed to understand things that apparently had not occurred to her when she was raising children herself.

That children needed affection.

Support.

Love that was expressed instead of assumed.

She came to understand some of that.

Eventually.

The problem with eventually is that childhood does not wait.

By the time some adults discover tenderness, the children they raised have already learned how to survive without it.

And then those children become adults.

They get married.

They have children of their own.

They tell themselves they are different.

Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they are different in ten ways and exactly the same in one.

And sometimes that one thing is enough.

I think about that now because when I look backward, the violence in my childhood did not begin with my childhood.

It was already moving.

Long before anybody knew my name, something had been traveling through those families.

Grandmother to daughter.

Grandmother to son.

Parent to child.

Pain presented as discipline.

Fear presented as respect.

Authority enforced physically because apparently authority alone was not enough.

Then my parents met.

They were barely adults.

They fell in love.

They got married.

Nine months later, there I was.

And without knowing any of it yet, I had arrived in the middle of a story that had already been going on for generations.