Perhaps that's why I struggled so hard the first year of my marriage. While my older sister married at eighteen. I was twenty eight.
I try so hard at times, closing my eyes and lifting boulders off all my repressed memories. But I can't. I see instead old, worn snapshots I had spent hours staring at in the album. Memorizing each smiling face, each simple gesture caught, praying that I could be in that moment. I try and recall the smell of the spring air. The warm sun on my face as a gentle breeze blows my blonde curls across my forehead. But I'm not there. I studied his face the most. Searching for any resemblance. My sister is the one who looks like him, I am a replica of our mother. We were so young then.
Our mom always tried to protect us. She was a weak, beaten down young mother with a monster as her husband. The strength she lacked for herself, she made up in her love for us. She left him. We left him.
The one constant in my adolescence were nights huddled together in bed. Mom holding us tight and through the darkness she would whisper, "It's ok. We are together. The three of us." It was the three of us for so long. Boyfriends came and went, none fitting the task of husband and father.
I was born to be a daddy's girl. But when she did re-marry, I was terrified. I felt at any moment, he would leave. They were married when I was finishing Junior High, it was a time in my life when I desperately needed a dad. Daily I evaluated our family. 'If he left now, it would be okay. He's just Mike.' As years carried out, my evaluations turned from daily to weekly and slowly just once a year. Somewhere the distinction was lost. I grew to love and trust him. I could no longer bring myself to call him Mike. He was my Daddy and in my thirties, I still called him Daddy.
Now my evaluation is real and it is more involved than I ever could have imagined.
