Calming the Storm...

fiction

His first memory was of his mother. Which wasn't all that unusual. A lot of people had a first memory that was tied to a parent. But his first memory was of his mother controlling a storm.

She was in the yard and her hair was flying. A halo around her head being lifted by a relentless wind. Her arms waving this way and that as she conducted the air. He knew, later in life, that she must have been pulling in laundry off of the line before the rain came, but his 3 year old brain had edited out the clothes and left only her out in the storm waving it away to protect their house. To protect him. To protect his baby sister.

His mother was magic. This he knew. She could control the storm. She could protect the house and her children.

Years later he realized that she could, but that the storm was his father.

She would feel for a shift in temperature, a breeze indicating a tornado was coming, and she would shuffle them off to their rooms with games and videos and distractions. Then she would softly close the door and turn to face the storm herself.

His sister's voice filled his head, "Dad wasn't a bad guy." She always wanted to make sure people knew that, he wasn't a bad guy. He had never hit them. Never hit his mother as far as he knew. But not all damage is physical.

He remembered when he was around 10 overhearing his mother and his aunt in the kitchen. His aunt was telling his mother she should leave. His mother just laughed. Why would she do that? Think of the children his aunt had spat. He remembered feeling the temperature in the house drop by at least ten degrees as his mother turned frosty. Controlling the storm inside herself but only barely.

She was thinking of the children. She was always thinking of the children. His aunt said all she was doing was teaching them to hide from him. His mother asked how leaving him wasn't just hiding in a different house? But, and here she got very quiet and he had to inch closer to the kitchen to hear her, if she did leave he would get partial custody and what then? What if on his weekend it had been a bad week? What if the darkness crept in and she wasn't there to shine a light for him to find a way out? Wasn't that worse for the children? Then she forbade my aunt from ever talking about it again.

His sister's voice is in his head again making sure he said that Dad wasn't a bad guy.

He was just...

My dad died when I was 14, my sister was only 12. I think maybe she hadn't disappointed him yet. And maybe she never would have. Maybe only sons could disappoint fathers like that. Maybe daughters were always kept new and fresh and full of hope. Maybe because she was foreign to him, pink ribbons and Barbies, she could never have fallen short of the mark he set. But me? I was never quite enough.

I wasn't enough of an athlete to get away with my mediocre grades. I wasn't smart enough to get away with being just an average athlete. I was always just short of the mark. Though, honestly, I'm not sure where the mark even was. I'm not sure what he expected of a 1o, 11, 12, 13 year old who hadn't even grown into his body let alone his mind.

He died before I lettered in track. Before I graduated in the top 10% of my high school class. Though I'm not sure that if he had lived I would have done either. I ran to forget that he was dead. To ignore that my mother was working more hours than I thought her body could handle. To forget that my sister cried in her room for a man I wasn't sure I had even liked. I studied to shut out the voices telling me that I would never measure up. Not now. There was no way to now. My chance was gone.

Five years after my father died I came home from my freshman year in college. My sister and my mother had settled into a routine that did not include me. They had weathered the worst of their own grief. Learning how to carry it without being carried away by it. They laughed at things I didn't understand and when they would try to explain to me why it was funny they laughed even harder.

I could have resented them. I could have been angry that I was missing out. I could have let the storm that would take over my father take over me. But I didn't. I smiled and laughed with them as they laughed at me. I had watched my mother control the storm, calm the winds, and through that she had taught me to do the same.

My mother was magic. She controlled the storm when I was a child, now it was up to me.