Page 143 of All Too Well
“She liked talking about the ships.”
He smiles and laughs a little. “You used to like talking about them too. She’s a lot like you, at least in the short time I got to spend with her. There were similarities.”
“She reminds me of Mom.”
Dad’s eyes mist over a little. “As do you. Remind me of your mother, that is.”
I sigh, looking away, feeling uncomfortable. “I need to know the truth, Dad. Caspian seems to think there’s some missing information that I wasn’t privy to.”
My father shifts and then laces his fingers on the table in front of him. “Your mother, despite all her struggles, didn’t just choose to give up. I know you saw it that way, and, honestly, I did, too, for a long time. She didn’t want to be sick, and I thought she had a real simple solution to it—fight.”
“That was the damn solution!”
“Yes, but not to her,” he says, leaning back. “I pleaded with her. I offered her a million things if she’d just try it. She’d touch my face, tell me she loved me, but that she wasn’t going to prolong a life that was not going to be anything like she lived.”
“But she’d live.”
“Would she?” he tosses back. “Your mother who loved to bake cakes, dance around this kitchen with her horrible music blaring, spend hours in that garden trimming? Because she wouldn’t have that life anymore. She’d be tired all the time, be stuck in her room, be afraid of getting sick because it could be what ended her instead of the cancer. That’s how she saw it.”
I push back, anger starting to fill me. “She lived that life too, Dad. Because of you.”
“Yes. I know that I did that to her.”
My head snaps to meet his gaze. “What?”
“She did. She went into her horrible depressions where lifewasn’t worth getting out of bed some days. Before a deployment I’d watch her day by day start to sink. No matter what medication we tried, therapy, or anything else we could do wouldn’t stop it. I had to get on that ship, knowing that my wife and son were going to fall apart. Sure, I would ask the Admiral and Ms. MacKinley to check on you both. I even hired someone to come help her when you were young, but she fired her and sent me an email cursing me out.” He smiles at that. “She didn’t like anyone telling her what to do. I don’t know if you remember when I decided to leave the military?”
I shake my head.
“You were maybe thirteen. We’d just moved here a few years before, and I was on shore duty, so things were good, but then they explained I’d need to go back to a ship again. I’d gotten special permission to stay on an extended shore duty because your mother was struggling. When I told her, I explained that I was done. I wasn’t going to leave her again. She lost it.”
I lean back. “What do you mean?”
“She lost it, Lachlan. I’m talking full-blown freak-out. I’d never seen her so angry at me. I had several years left before I could retire, and she told me she’d divorce me if I didn’t finish out my time.”
“So you stayed?”
My father sighs heavily and nods. “I couldn’t lose her. If you think I didn’t love your mother, you know nothing. That woman was the reason I breathed, and when she found out she was pregnant ...”
I can’t explain it, but something feels strange. “When she found out she was pregnant, what?”
“We knew your mother’s mental state when we married. I loved her, and I didn’t care that she struggled. We were going to struggle together. We grew up in nowhere Nebraska, and I wanted a better life for us. So we discussed it and decided to join the navy. She, well, she just didn’t ever want to be a bad mother. It was a huge surprise when she got pregnant.”
I sit back, feeling the breath leave my lungs. “But she was the best.”
“She was, but she was terrified. She didn’t think she should ever have a child, and leading up to your birth were some of the worst times in her life. She had to come off her medication, and it was hard, but she loved you. Before she met you, she loved you, wanted you, was willing to fight every battle to have you, even though we both agreed we never should’ve gotten pregnant. At your birth she had her tubes tied because she knew she couldn’t endure another pregnancy.”
My father’s eyes are distant, and I can see the weight of this on him.
My mother never once made me feel like she regretted having me, nor did she ever say she didn’t want to have kids. She loved my father and me. I knew that, but I don’t understand why she wouldn’t let him retire early. Why did she always have to put herself in pain to help others?
And when I ask myself that simple question, it’s as though someone just turned the lights on inside me.
It’s the same shit I do.
I look at my father, feeling for the first time in four years a sympathy for what he must’ve felt on the other side of her decisions.
“She wouldn’t let you give up your career for her. She wouldn’t let you protect her because she was so damn busy doing it for everyone else.”
