Family Heritage
by Gustavo Melo
You can call me dumb if you’d like, but I prefer to think of myself as innocent. Growing up, I was constantly bullied because of my name, Oedipus. To all the other kids it sounded foreign and weird, but my parents were art snobs that wanted to be different. I prayed my eighteenth birthday would fly by so I could legally change my moniker to Bob or something else mundane. And that was before I was even introduced to the Greek play my parents so much enjoyed.
Mrs. Finneckler was one of those self-aggrandizing, private liberal arts school, English teachers. She thought it would be enlightening to introduce our sixth-grade class to the Greek tragedy. Mind you, it’s a 9th to 10th-grade level read. I never thought the bullying could get any worse, but it did. However, I no longer cared about what happened in school, I went home that afternoon convinced I would have to bed my mother and kill my dad. That’s very confusing for a boy who just recently discovered his sexuality and had already experienced the bewildering trauma of jerking off to a leftover bra his mom forgot in the bathroom.
Yes, mom showed signs she was once beautiful, but she was my mother. And my dad wasn’t a strong man by any means, but I was a pretty realistic twelve-year-old who chose chess lessons instead of karate; my chances of taking him seemed pretty low. That’s where my innocence comes in, I thought regardless of my love for my dad, and my strictly platonic love for my mom, I was convinced I would have no choice. It seemed inevitable.
That night I skipped dinner and cried myself to bed. Around midnight I ran out of tears and decided to turn on Cinemax, which my parents paid for the actual movies. The softcore porn playing would be the perfect distraction to my problems if it wasn’t for the main actress’s stage name: Adriana, just like my mother’s real name.
For a week, I could barely look either one of my parents in the face. It took them probably too long, but finally, they suspected something was wrong. After a long discussion where I had to prove I wasn’t doing drugs, I finally came clean and explained my newfound fear. They both thought it was funny, which felt disrespectful to my feelings. However, they explained my mother was infertile and I was adopted, something they had decided to wait until I was old enough to find out. They were thinking the age of fifteen, but something about me already thinking about fucking my mother hinted I was growing up fast.
I thought naming your adopted kid Oedipus was even worse than if it was your biological son. The shock of being adopted was softened by the relief of no longer feeling like I would have to poison my dad’s matinal pineapple smoothies.
The whole thing eventually switched my perspective on my name; it gave it some fucked up inside joke context that I appreciated. Still, the fear of the irony stayed with me for a long time. I purposefully avoided older women and constantly reminded myself that murder is bad, even in traffic. When I finally turned eighteen, I no longer wanted to change my name, I was used to it being misspelled everywhere.
It wasn’t until a girlfriend went through my computer and pointed out how much stepmother porn I watched that I realized how big of an impact this whole thing had on me. But my biggest takeaway was that as humans we absolutely have free will. Whether or not I have sex with my mother and kill my father is my own choice. It isn’t because I have a weird name that I am destined to do weird things. That is why when I was thirty and received a letter and a current photo of this gorgeous woman claiming to be my biological mother wanting to meet, I trashed the note and changed addresses. Because I might have free will, but I’m not sure I have self-control.
Gustavo Melo (he/him) is a Brazilian satirical writer with a successful track record of one failed marriage by the age of 25. Knowing little about smart financial decisions, he got a highly practical master's degree in writing for screen and television at the University of Southern California. To deal with those and other failures, he often writes humorous pieces which he workshops by testing whether his therapist will finally throw in the towel. You can read his work in the Feminine Collective, Apricity Magazine, and other publications. He can be found on Instagram @gusbmelo.