When I Was Young

When I was young, I believed that my father was invincible and my mother was strong. Then my father developed Parkinson’s disease and my mother married a man who mentally and physically abused her and her children. I was too young to understand that sometimes what looks like weakness is really terror.

When I was young, I met my future stepfather in my mother’s best friend’s kitchen in the middle of the night, and I didn’t like him one bit. They married, and he broke my mother’s ribs, beat my sister so hard she couldn’t sit down for three days, put my brother’s head through a window, and made me wear a diaper to school under my dress when I was 6 to show me what a baby I was because I was so deathly afraid of him, I’d wet the bed the night before. He told all of us that if he asked my mother to choose between her children and her husband that she would choose him. She was standing in the room at the time, and didn’t say a word. I was too young to understand her silence.

When I was young, my mother called my sister and I from a party that they’d been to and told us to get the hell out of the house because my stepfather was coming home to kill us. I was too young to understand, but I knew enough to be scared.

When I was young, my father remarried a kind woman with the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. She took me to the library, loved cats and bought me a new dress for my birthday, and I understood her.

When I was a little older, my mother gathered her courage and threw that man out, but not before he’d forced her to commit my sister to a psychiatric hospital before we left to move to another country and never let me say goodbye. How I hated him. I was beginning to understand that not all people in the world are good.

When I was older still, I left my mother in that country across the sea and moved back to live with my father and stepmother in what felt like an arctic wilderness. I met my best friends there and I began to understand what true friendship really is. I also grew to understand the meaning of ‘wind chill factor.’

When I was older, my father’s Parkinson’s got worse and it broke my heart to see my Superman shuffle and stumble and shake when he walked. Sometimes he couldn’t walk at all if his medicine didn’t kick in. I understood that no one is immortal.

When I was on my own, I met a man I thought would be my future. He tore through my heart and my past and left me to start again. I understood that sometimes to save your own life, you have to let go of someone else’s.

When I was older still, my brother and my sister and I sat down and held each other and cried for the family we lost when we were young and we began to rebuild our relationships. I understood that sometimes you can go home again.

When I was a little older, I met another man and decided he would be my future. We married and had a beautiful baby boy who has my father’s eyes. I understood what unconditional and all-consuming love is.

When I was a little older still, my best friend’s son died. I understood that God works in mysterious ways and that sometimes he makes angels so perfect that he can’t bear to be apart from them for very long.

When I was older still, I discovered that loving someone sometimes isn’t enough, and sometimes things have to end. I understood that no one person is to blame for anything, but that I have to accept responsibility for the things I have done.

Now I’m a little older. I understand that life isn’t perfect, but it is what you make of it. I understand more than I ever thought I would, and also that I have so very much yet to learn...