By My Side

Ever wonder how I came to be your witness? Your triggers and your trauma deemed it so.

You sped off from our 1920s bungalow on Herbert Street in a Porsche so bright yellow that looking at it felt like my eyes were being scratched.

You took only your foul weather gear for sailing. The belly of the car could fit more, but what more would you need than the symbol of your selfishness at the time. Apropos packing for a life with no plan.

You joked later about this like it was an act of generosity toward our mother to leave her with everything and take nothing for yourself, but I’m certain she would have spared a picture or two of us with very little resistance. You didn’t ask and she didn’t give it, because you were already gone long before you left.

The trauma of this took shape as it left me because out of me poured purpose. Purpose akin to that of a pile under a pier promising to support it during the worst of storms. I would be there, in perpetuity, as your brace.

My devotion to the role should’ve been alarming to the adults in the room. They didn’t know I filled my time with plans for your return to the cast of the welcomed.

You carried on recklessly, my doting heart in your hands.

Eight-year-old girls have soft spots for Saturday morning donuts, sleepovers at their best friend’s house, or long-standing pretend games played with cousins. They don’t usually feel called to carry the story of a grown man so that the world doesn’t forget him.

The notion of you alone was too much for my young heart to bear so I folded myself into your cause like an eager empath. Ensuring my heart, our future, and your redemption were intertwined like a tight braid.

For your needs had arranged themselves in front of me like a numbered waiting line at a government office. All business, no room for questions. This one first, that one next.

Make sure no one forgets his good side. Make sure he knows he’s loved. Tolerate his missteps because he’s alone now. Don’t ever hold him accountable because he’s hurting. Remember that he’s always hurting. Broadcast his finer moments to everyone that will listen. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Witness his everything because he has no one else.

Ever the pleaser, I took the calling with an unrelenting devotion. An astuteness I’d come to regret as an adult when I needed to untangle the strings of this messy knot between us.

I’m old enough to have my own eight-year-old girl now. The way she tries to carry me is all too familiar. It leaves me raw and bare all over again. The way she repeats, “I love you, Mama” over and over again when she thinks I’m mad. Her endless attempts to diffuse tension in a room stirs up in me the ghosts of that day when I made the decision to give you everything.

The difference between you and me is that before your body steps into a room, your energy presents brokenness first. It’s part of what endears you to strangers and friends alike. The disarming nature of your humility. Your candor. These are just some of the ways you provide redemption for the tickets you punched when you were awkward, when you were too blunt, when you were rude, when you didn’t listen, when you interrupted someone, or when you were tone deaf to the emotion in the room.

All these years after that day on Herbert Street, I am weighed down by the realization that there’s less of me when I’m functioning for you. I’m smaller. Less alive and less able to thrive.

My contribution to the world is negligible. A barnacle on a ship that slices through the water with an entitled force otherwise known as arrogance.

It's 32 years later, and you decide to visit the family I’ve made. You don’t ask, you decide. I’m sick at the time but you pay no mind to this detail. You parted ways with the booze all those years ago, but you never figured out how to unhitch yourself from your self-centeredness. When you arrive, you enter our home as though you’re still the young boy who wasn’t allowed to be anything young boys are. I watch as you bend the time space continuum and in this doomed environment you create, you mistake my boys for yourself. You spend all day attempting to tamp down their boisterous spirits. You don’t like noise because you weren’t allowed to be noisy. You don’t know what to do with yourself when they jump around like fleas because sitting still and quietly was all the wiggle room you were given growing up.

My body is weeping in ways I never thought were imaginable. I was sick before you showed up, but now your all-encompassing energy has sucked out what little I had left in the tank.

The baby pulls a storage cabinet down on himself and I scream for help. The shrimp cocktail you're eating must’ve been mind-blowing because you can’t tear yourself away from it. You act like you don’t hear me and keep tearing the tiny tails off with your teeth. “Jess, do you have any more lemon?” I’m still inspecting the baby’s body to make sure we don’t need to rush to the emergency room.

Sometimes the straw that breaks us looks like shrimp cocktail. It wasn’t the time you missed my High School graduation and then lied about it. Or the day you sold the Glamour Tan and Cream ’56 Chevy you got me that was supposed to be my first car. You even let me sit in it for days pretending to joyride. It wasn’t when you’d snap at my little sister who was still in diapers and so terrified each time we’d have to spend the night with you after you left. It feels foreign to me now but even I wanted her to pull it together back then. That’s how committed I was to your happiness—I left my baby sister’s needs unmet so that I could make sure you didn’t have to endure the discomfort of her signals that things weren’t okay. Nothing at the time was okay. I didn’t realize all those years ago when she was walking around your apartment in a saggy diaper that she was the canary in our family coal mine. She knew you were unsorted and unsafe on so many levels. Today, she’s a safe harbor for so many when things unravel because she’ll never let anyone believe their sadness should go unnoticed.

I have to ask you to leave. I’ve never been so bold. I’ve never asked you to not be a part of anything. I’ve never been so consumed with my own salvation. The fruits of a life lived with loyalty to myself first representing every good reason I’d ever need. I ponder it for a whole day before I scare up the courage to do it. On the morning of this pivotal moment, I try to give myself a million outs. But I know…I know what has to be done just like I know that when I do it, everything will forever be changed. Because, you see, I’ve been untangling us ever since I started having my own kids.

I can tell is something’s off in me. It feels foreign, this intuition demanding my attention and shoving me toward you. Nipping at my heels, whispering to me that today is the day I get to set down the duffel bags I’ve carried for you all those years. Today tastes like freedom.

When I finally sit you down to unload this mammoth sized boulder from my heart, you know before I even open my mouth. The 12-step program you work allows you to be self-aware just enough to know when you’ve crossed a line, but not enough to stop you from crossing it in the first place. I only get two words out before you look down in shame and regret. I’m about to break our soul contract and you already know it. You sense that what comes next is you’re no longer allowed to call the shots. My energy alone conveys the uncomfortable truth that you and I have just switched roles. The well building in your eyes tells me I’m now the one who will ration out time and attention. You’re now the one who’s unsure of where you stand.

It’s too much for you. I was the dock you were always supposed to be moored to. But you cut the rope with your never ending and selfish disregard and you see that now. I was never supposed to tire of your antics. I had signed up at eight to be your witness and, with that, I had agreed to give up my carefree years in devotion to this unpaid job. But you see all this now. Hindsight and foresight are one. You even hear the words I couldn’t find a way to say.

The space between us in that moment is the space between you and the world around you every day of your life. That space is not mine to mind. The void of connection in your life is not mine to remediate. The lack of people wanting to gather around you in celebration of your retirement is not mine to manufacture. The trauma you are yet to rock to sleep is not my wound to dress.

And so you go. Daylight doesn’t even break before you shove off to deliver yourself home, surely rewriting the events of the day before into a version that absolves you of your part.

But that’s not my work, either.

My work is to look after me in this one life I was given. It was out of innocence that this thing between us was born. I didn’t know any better at the time—the bridge I was building between you and us and the rest of the world was made out of love. But when we know better, we can try to do better. At least that’s what they say.

It’s time to thank the version of me from all those years ago that thought she was doing the right thing…the loving thing. She can rest now. She needn’t worry about how this will all end up. That burden is too heavy for eight-year-old shoulders to bear.

The boundaries between you and me and my younger selves will be written and re-written in an unending way.

Today is not only for me, but for the next generation. That moment with my baby in my arms wasn’t the single moment I decided to shift our paradigm. It was just the most absurd and recent example of everything unhealthy between us. The truth is that there were thousands of moments that came before that one. Countless moments just like that where my gaze was turned toward the idea of leaving and upending our thing so that I could stand with myself instead. I just needed something to cement my desire for a more surefooted stance going forward.

Like most parents, even when we’re not totally sure of how to live for ourselves, we somehow always seem to know how to live for our kids. And it’s clearer now than ever before that the modeling I have to do for my kids is to show them what it looks like when you stay with yourself. To choose yourself. Over comfort. Over years of patterning. Over every uncomfortable moment that might come after this one when you choose you. It’s deliverance of the best kind. Even if it means from one of the people who brought you into this world to learn that very lesson.

And that right there, Dad, is how we re-shape the helix of our emotional DNA. Trauma doesn’t always have to be stored in the bodies of the generations after us. We can decide to put an end to it while one of us comforts her baby in her arms and the other one eats shrimp cocktail.