What Sticks

My childhood profoundly affects the way I parent.

I learn from the past and always tried to be the parent I needed to have, so I do this odd thing where I have always treated my daughters like they are people, actual real people who will grow up with voices of their own one day. They will grow up remembering, and as their mother I am up to half of the main architects of those memories. Holidays, birthdays, outings, making art, reading stories, tea parties and dance parties, comfort food and comfort words, jokes, hope, and wisdom; I am aware of how the smallest thing can shape a mind or break a heart.

I am aware of how damage works.

I would try to sprinkle my favorite, most useful bits of me into their developing psyches and hope that it stuck, trying to add the things I wish I’d had instilled in me as a child. There are ideas about who I wish them to be when they grew up; soft and strong, clever and kind, but mostly I wanted to prepare them for the world. I can’t control what sticks, so it’s the things I don’t mean to teach them at all that I am mindful of. I at least hope that the sarcasm they will inevitably pick up from me will be bone deep because humor is a shield and words can be weapons. They will need weapons.

This world is cruel and I encourage them to write it all down.

Writing it down goes way back with me. When I was ten I told my father I was going to write a book and I wasn’t changing any names. It was a threat. I’ve kept journals since I was twelve. Years ago, I would tell my husband I wrote for revenge. It was a joke.

I have kept aware of who my daughters were. Before all of this, Violet was already going through so much with bullying and anxiety this year that she was in therapy to help her cope. She is stronghearted but sensitive, with a powerful sense of right and wrong that makes me proud. She is empathetic and usually knows the exact right thing to say, which can be a dangerous gift in someone less kind and sincere. She has a hard time understanding cruelty and selfishness.

Where Violet is only sensitive, Lily’s skin is paper thin, but covered with thorns. She is frighteningly quick minded, but thoughts tend to burrow deep and at six she can sometimes cut to the heart of things better than some people five times her age. She is highly reactive and fierce, almost volatile, but that’s only because she feels everything so wildly. There is a storm in that one.

I always thought that my husband would pass down all of the things that he loved to them, just as I did, and I hoped they would pick up the traits I loved about him, but we can’t control what sticks. The man I thought he was valued his family above all else and would never do anything to hurt his children. I thought he knew them well enough to understand how incredibly important it was for them to have the sanctuary of a safe, reliable home and family. I thought he understood that because we were a family, even when he was at work, he was still part of us and we missed him on those days he was supposed to be here.

He knew that since Violet was small, whenever she was having a rough time at school, I would tell her that her family would always be there for her and as long as we were together, we would be okay. He knew this.

Last night Lily said that things were so different now since daddy is gone. “I mean, we do a lot more fun things with him…” she looked up thoughtfully from her little chalkboard. “But it’s not as fun because you aren’t there. It’s still fun. But not as fun. I wish you could come too.”

Getting used to these innocently painful musings of hers, I told her that I did too, but it was okay that I didn’t come and I was really glad she was having fun with her dad. I remembered when he first started taking them swimming at some public pool, she had come home so excited to tell me all about it but trailed off as she realized, “ Why didn’t you come with us?” She’d asked, then answered herself. “ Oh! I think it’s because Uncle Thomas was there and there wasn’t enough room in the car. But you can probably come next time!”

She smiled then and I returned it, saying nothing.

Later she pulled four pine cones out of a basket and assigned one to each of us, including her father. She arranged them all in a row before pushing them together, creating a little, intact family. She won’t understand what his leaving means for her all at once. It’s too big and too painful for someone so small. When he finally told her that he wasn’t coming home, she didn’t know that he meant never. It is unpredictable what causes it to really hit her, but when it does, it hits hard.

“Wait. Waitwaitwait!” She sat on the couch shaking her head one night back in about June when she’d overheard me talking Violet down. “This isn’t…this isn’t...right.”

Violet had just told me how her father had contradicted himself when she had tried to talk to him earlier that day, saying that leaving was not his decision when he had told her previously that it was. She already knew that it was and was upset. It was then I heard a high pitched noise coming from the princess castle tent where Lily had been hiding, she had her knees pulled tight to her chest and she was crying like I had never heard her cry before. She looked so sad, but there was such fear in her wide eyes.

She looked lost.

It had been a few weeks since he told her he wasn’t coming home, but hearing the word “decision” just then was for some reason the trigger that made it final for her. “What about my birthday? What about Christmas?! He can’t never come home- this is….this is home!”

I had to put Violet on hold while I held her close as she wailed and then she would break free and ask questions only to dissolve into more tears, each sob cutting into my very soul. I tried to console her, while next to me Violet blinked away tears, her face uncharacteristically stoic.

“But… it’s not right.” Her little hands gestured firmly in front of her as though she were presenting a very solid argument. “This isn’t right though. This doesn’t feel right!”

There was nothing I could say to make this better, if there were I’d have told them to myself months before because truer words had never been spoken; it wasn’t right. Bad enough that he broke what he did in me to scurry away, but in doing so he also traded the girl’s happiness for his own. Since the night he walked out and I thought there was still hope for him, I’d tried to make him understand what he was risking and that you cannot just wreck your family out of nowhere; you just can’t. You try absolutely everything to fix it because this is what you are breaking, this is who you are breaking and the damage is permanent.

I remember being younger than Lily and sitting on my steps one night, having been woken up by my parents yelling at each other. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I remember that feeling of dread so deep that it locked in that memory in detail. I can still remember the pattern of the ugly orange and brown rug under my bare feet, the chipped wooden railing above my head as I sat on the stairs and listened out of sight.

When parents split up, there are warning signs that the children pick up on even if they don’t know quite what they mean until it’s too late. There is the sense that something is wrong. But I was not the only one blindsided by him walking out on us. My husband and I got along great, our relationship was full of affectionate humor and there was no coldness or distance to be picked up on. To the girls, it seemed that one day their father just stopped living here, then he became a visitor and their mother started crying often and taking long walks at night.

This is what will stick, this is what will stain.

I used to have this nightmare after my dad left about my mother standing over the sink doing dishes, her shoulders shaking. It was so vivid right down to the detail of the tattered edges of her white robe, her hair was a mess, but when I went to her, she turned to me and smiled. There was something wrong with her smile. It was too wide, too wrong and it didn’t match her eyes. In the waking world, I remembered that smile long after I forgot her face.

A few years later, she would leave me too.

So, I make a point to not bottle up my emotions all the time and I do not try to slap a smile on when I’m devastated. I let them know that sometimes I’m going to be sad about this and that’s okay, it’s okay to be sad or even angry.

I asked Lily if she wanted to call him, thinking maybe hearing his voice would make her feel better. “Daddy, are you not ever coming home?!” She asked desperately, and he told her he wasn’t. “But..but I’ll miss you..”

I think I tore something trying to keep myself from breaking down listening to this, the sound of my family shattering down more bit by bit. Just under that was a sharp anger at the cause of it. Of course she missed him. They both did and always would for the rest of their lives. They wouldn’t stop missing the family we had and neither would I. I wonder if the woman he left us for was sitting next to him while his daughter cried into the phone before saying she had to go because she was too upset to keep talking.

Because of course, he doesn’t get to actually be there for any of this-the pain he caused. He doesn’t have to see it or have to try to make it better knowing he can’t. He gets out of having his heart torn open a little more with each of his daughter’s tears because of something he did to them. At most he gets a ninety second phone call where they try to tell him they miss him, or to ask him something about why he isn’t there until they get too choked up to continue. And that’s it. He gets to continue on with his night, likely with his heartless, homewrecking girlfriend , while I get to pick up the pieces of his children that he has caused to break. It is not brought up the next time he sees them because when he sees them, they do “more fun things”.

I’ve been told by their therapist that the best thing I can do is be there for them, continue to assure them that I’m not going anywhere, and listen when they need to talk. I used to tell their father when Lily would cry herself to sleep over his being gone or when Violet couldn’t sleep at all because of it, but it so often led to nothing. He would ask about their therapy. Anyone who’s been through enough therapy knows that it doesn’t heal your wounds, it only helps you through, and for some people it doesn’t even do that. It doesn’t fix a broken bond.

They rarely ask to call him anymore when they are upset.

When you realize that one parent has deeply hurt and betrayed the other, it affects how you see them. While his walking out on us is still busy staining their childhoods on its own, the fact of his infidelity will come into play much later when it overshadows how they look at relationships, love and trust.

I hadn’t thought of it before all of this, but infidelity really affects children. That betrayal cuts straight through the entire family. Even if they don’t understand all of what he did and didn’t have me to answer questions when they got older, believe me, they would piece it together on their own eventually.

My next memory after that night on the stairs was of my father not being there anymore and my mother at the kitchen table surrounded by these grownup women, friends of hers I had never seen before.They would stop talking in their angry sounding voices when I came in. My mother was chain smoking; in front of her was a postcard my father had sent from Disneyworld. I was excited to get the postcard but immensely confused that he hadn’t taken me, or even told me that he was going. And why on earth was he there alone with Aunt Lori? She wasn’t even actually my aunt at all but a close family friend…

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately.

When he first left, Violet and I used to wish on the stars every night. The wishes were secret, no more silly than prayers, but it made her feel better. When she knew he was gone for good, she wouldn’t wish on them anymore. There was no point, she said.

Some nights, instead of having a bedtime story, Lily breaks down. She’ll cry that she just misses her daddy being here, that she doesn’t understand why he just left, and that he can just come back. It’s so simple to just come back! He should come back. And I lay there next to her, grateful for the dark room, with one hand clasped over my mouth so that she won’t know that I am crying too.

*Today Lily brought me three flowers. She said one was me, one her, and one Violet.*

Sometimes, I wonder if deep, deep down under the hurt and anger and bitterness, I may feel something like pity for him one day, because one day, he may realize that those he so profoundly hurt were those who loved him most in this world. He might truly realize how important this all was and I can’t imagine how awful that day might feel for him. But then again I’ve been wrong before, and maybe he’ll revel in the shallow life he’s traded this family for.

I am still fighting to restore balance to our lives, which is a lot like trying to hang pictures of those happy memories I tried to give them on the walls, while also trying to keep those walls from falling in on us. I tell my daughters that it will all be okay someday and remind them that I’m not going to leave. I tell them that we have each other. I tell them that their father loves them. But I can’t control what sticks