An avalanche would have been jealous of the way my mother let herself go. She was only mere inches from me, completely crumbled in my desk chair, her flushed face buried in her palms and her knee brushed against mine with every sob. I was fifteen years old when my mother asked me if dad was cheating. He was. I knew he was.
"No," was what I said. And then I helplessly sat there on my bed as everything spiraled out of control. Immediately I knew that despite my loyal efforts towards my father, she could tell I was lying. But all the pent-up anger I expected for her to lash out at me for seeing through my cover never came. Sitting across from me was a strong woman falling apart. It was like shards of glass spilling across my bedroom floor, the way she silently expressed her deepest and darkest emotions. All I wanted to do then was pick her up and put her back together again, but there's a time in every you girl's life where all she can do is keep her distance, hang her head and let the dam burst. It wasn't long until I could feel the shame trickle down my cheeks as well. For all we've been through- all she's been through- I never thought I'd see her break like that.
It was around the same time that I started thinking about romance as more than just a daydream of princes and fairytales. I grew up in a religious household, to say the least. The idea of divorce was scoffed at. Men and woman were meant to court, get married and let it be until their physical beings perished and they'd be lifted to heaven or whatever. That was engraved into my brain since three years old when my father first took my family to a little church in Macedon. To me, true love was between anyone who fit THAT profile.
At fifteen years old, something decided to challenge that. My mother looked at me from her crouched up position in my chair with a smile that tugged painfully on her lips and made my insides sore. There was no way that after all that time crying, she could feel like smiling, much less at me.
I knew that she wasn't happy of course. That smile was another facade that masked her true emotions because I had just seen it moments before. The mist in her eyes was long forgotten and her cheeks for damp, but no longer flushed. She was an actress at work putting on a show for me to hide the fact that there WAS something that could ruin the idea of love she raised me to believe in. That even a common tendency, such as betrayal, could never effect a strong Christian relationship, but the slice of what I had seen showed a different story.
Her hand gently stroked the back of my hand as she pulled me closer and pressed her chapped lips on my forehead. It was probably sweaty, but she was too busy slapping cement on the wall around her to notice that, or me shaking rapidly in her embrace. I wasn't just a lie in the form of her daughter anymore, I was a reason to hold on.
If there was one thing I learned from that experience, (besides to never lie to your mother because she'll see right through it) it was that my parents were far from perfect. Whatever mask my mother was wearing had been placed comfortably back on that night which only made me think about all the times she had to wear it before. This picture I had implanted in my head about what true love was had been torn slightly at the edges.
Little did I know, it would soon be throw in a blender.
I was seventeen when I again asked myself what love was. I came out to my then best friend in the back room of that little church in Macedon and she reached across the table to leave a hand print on my cheek, disgusted. Then there was the time I fought the doubts in my head and stood in front of my parents to confess a second time.
Dad said, "I know."
Mom said, "You're kidding right?"
So, I asked God for his answer, then asked God if he was real.
Mom stopped talking for a few months, but the last person I thought would help me understand anything was my father. The two of us were parked in our driveway a little after two on a Sunday when I went to open the door of his Nissan X-tera and he stopped me. And we talked. And we REALLY talked. About life, love and all his mistakes I never realized he made. He confided in me for the first time like a friend and told me stories of his past in foster care I don't think another soul knew about.
I found out that the woman I called "grandma" fell in love and married a man who couldn't handle the three kids she already had with someone else so in fear of losing him, she told my six year old father she was giving him to the state. He told me that since he was the oldest, he was suppose to handle it the best and that over time, he learned how to live the way he did. Even after they got a divorce a few years after giving my father up, she never tried to get him back, so that feeling of betrayal and abandonment never went away.
Grandma only came over for holidays and that year I barely said two words to her. I was too angry and confused to asked her what her side of the story was, and I still have yet to know. The important thing to me was, how in love she had to be to do what she did and how if molded my father's idea of what love does to people.
"I loved your mother when I married her, but I wasn't in love with her. I was nineteen and had the wrong idea of what it meant," my father told me. Thirty-three years later and he was still unsure of what it meant and confiding in his daughter to explain what I thought.
If you're still reading this and can't already tell, I still don't know shit about love. I'm 21 now and based on what I've observed so far, I think everybody is loving wrong. Even to this day, that best friend doesn't know that right before she slapped me in that little church in Macedon, "and I love you," was on the tip of my own tongue.
