“HERE.” DAD HANDS Momma an oven mitt.
Without looking, she reaches for it, her other hand opening the oven door. She pulls out the cookie sheet of roasted vegetables, turns, and sets it down on the hot-pad Dad slips onto the counter half a second before it welcomes the sheet. With his other hand, he reaches around her and nudges the oven door closed. Momma blows on a piping hot roasted mushroom, pops it into Dad’s mouth. He chews, pecks Momma on the mouth. The entire waltz spans seven seconds.
I am in love with their love. They layer conversation, taking turns listening, speaking. They seamlessly intuit and anticipate the other’s needs, and meet them. They fill ordinary moments with memorable sweetness.
Every day, I watch them greedily, collecting moments like a war-torn nation stockpiles food. I try to be stealthy but my spontaneous joyful tears give me away. Momma’s fear and insecurity that once hung like a heavy shroud has lifted. This Momma is vibrant and sassy. She grows more present daily, as though a giant, invisible hand is slowly coloring her in. Dad loves her with an unwavering effusiveness and loyalty equal to hers. Equally astounding is that he loves us kids with the same.
There are days I second-guess everything I say or do around Dad, scared I’ll misbehave, offend, or make him mad. Nearing the end of every month, I panic. I keep checking the clock for an imaginary end, expecting a phone call or email announcing my eviction. Ever the employee, friend, and girlfriend, “Is there anything else you need from me?” is a sentence branded on my tongue. With the circuitous obsession with which a dog chases her own tail, I continually offer to pay rent or chip in for groceries. Momma and Dad look at me, surprise and sadness tinting their eyes like age on a Polaroid.
“This is your home.” They stress each word as if speaking to a child. “You don’t need to earn your place.”
Our dogs are Lucy and Zekie. When God dispensed aesthetic cuteness, Lucy was overlooked. Zekie nudged her aside and basked in both shares. Lucy’s lack of physical loveliness is quickly forgotten, though, because of her sweetness and intelligence. She is a rescue dog, a rat terrier. Rat terriers are bred to track and hunt. They’re able to survive extreme conditions and run extraordinary lengths, overriding fatigue and hunger. They have an uncanny ability to follow orders, not slavishly, but through stoic determination.
We don’t have the details, but we know the first six years of Lucy’s life teemed with abuse. My parents adopted her three years ago. There are times she keeps her head down around me despite every tenderness I try. She’ll come and cuddle while I write. She’ll lick me silly when I return from running. But when I give her food, she looks at me warily like I’ll trick her and take it away. Over long minutes, she’ll creep toward her bowl, her enormous elfin eyes never leaving mine, disbelieving that this love is for her and won’t be retracted. Some days she cowers from all of us. I reckon she awoke those mornings from a night of dark memories. It is when I write about my brother as a child and now as I write about Lucy that I cry most.
In this house, the past can rest. We all coexist peacefully. The certainty of Momma and Dad’s availability and reliability feels like a privilege. I release a quiet fear: Living with others doesn’t always promise chaos. This love will not grade, degrade, punish, or disappear. I can simply be. I start smiling again. I make jokes.
My sister is undeniably Daddy’s girl. From the time she was 12 to 18, he made her school lunches, packed in brown paper bags, and drove her daily to school, a tradition that feels as ungraspable as a ghost. I love watching them together whenever she’s home from college. I’m deliriously grateful and envious of their closeness. Over these months, I’ll taste little snippets of that bond until I believe it as my own food. I’ll lob a passing comment about a man from my past, and Dad will bristle with protective rage. He’ll say, “If I ever meet the guy . . .” before letting the threat hang in the air like a gray cloud, fat with imminent storm. I’ll muse aloud about dating again one day, and he’ll casually say, “Make sure he’s good to you.” This seemingly innocuous sentiment undoes me at the seams. I feel special and precious, giddy like I’ve spritzed a new perfume to see if the waters suit me.
Little by little, I share with my family the events and emotions I’m writing about. Aside from sorting my pieces, I have another goal: to erase the difference between the way I am with you and the way I am with others. From now on, beginning with my family, I will be solely an open book. I’m excited. I’ve named this Our Indefinite Year of Truth.
I print a few chapters to send to my Warriors in New York. The printer is in Dad’s office. I hear him on a call. I don’t knock in fear of interrupting. I busy myself with a run. I return to find on my bed, the chapters, each paper-clipped with a pink clip.
He organized the pages. He thought to paper-clip them. He searched the little plastic dish for pink ones. Eight of them.
“Momma . . .” I’m too moved to finish. I clutch the chapters to my chest like a hot-water bottle, warming me.
“That’s your Dad,” she smiles.
I think this is what it’s like to be a kid.
“You’re changing,” says Momma. “You were always so pensive. You’re softening. Laughing. Changing. This is good for you.”
I smile. I don’t tell her that the transformation she sees in me, I see in her.
I had feared parts of me were frostbitten beyond repair. Thankfully, I’m salvageable. The months thaw me slowly as if held over a low flame. Love renews my blood.
THREE MONTHS HAVE PASSED.
Here in our home, Momma, Dad, you, and I, we are quaint, simple, and happy. We laugh over nonsensical things. We ask one another, “How was your day?” and then, we actually listen to what each person has to say. We cook abundant meals and eat them off one another’s plates, held on our laps in front of board games, movies, or conversations that stretch into dawn.
Occasionally I’ll glimpse the outside world through various screens. TV, phone, laptop. A show, person, or persona I once coveted. On cue, the seasons have slipped from summer into fall, fall into winter.
It has been merely three months since I left New York. Yet we are so far away. I lay down the different years I have been. The child, the girl, the young woman at 21, 23, 25, 28. I connect the constellation, character to character, event to event. Our story becomes vividly clear. I mine each memory for the lessons they hold. Answers crystalize, glistening like gold thread.
Although I have plenty of clothes, these days I like wearing clothing nabbed from Momma, Dad, and my siblings. For all hours and uses of the day: to run, to sleep, and especially to write. My favorite is an enormous Oregon Ducks sweatshirt belonging to Dad that reaches my knees. University of Oregon is Dad’s and my sister’s alma mater. I like feeling my loves around me.
While I adore every minute spent writing, I still cry when revisiting certain parts of my life. Thankfully, Dad works from home. He is a teacher for an online school. His office is the room across the hall from my sister’s. I knock on his door, he opens it. I stand there not knowing how to form the words. Asking for something, anything, is still difficult. Habits take time to dismantle. Now, all I can do is stand and cry.
“Can I have a—” He pulls me into the hug before I finish asking for it.
We tend to think deaths and events are all that require grieving, but selves, choices, habits, and relationships we’ve known, they need loving rituals of healing as well. The speed at which life demands we run, simply to make it to the next day, makes it difficult to see them through. Wounds tally. Addictions anesthetize the pain. We try to stitch while moving. But life’s racing pace continually tears open old scars and mangles the new ones. Mending-while-enduring is well meant but ultimately futile, the sutures never tight enough to hold.
I am revisiting myself. Year by year, I peer into the stitching.
I am 3. I am 5. I am 11. 13, 18, 23, 27, 29.
I mend the pieces. I arrange them just so. I cover myself with earth.