Mom I need you; why are you doing this? What happened to Daddy? Why can’t you talk to me? Why are you crying? Leave those babies alone, get them out of our house and bring my Daddy back, and where is my brother? I want them and me to have our Western Egg sandwiches together after we went to the rifle range. We would have a family dinner late... Where and why did he go away? You barely cook for me.
I wasn’t told what happened; I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. My father who lavished me with attention and my brother with his teasing, that only a teenage boy can offer. He left and where and why was he gone. “Children were to be seen and not heard” this was a quote that lingers within my memory as I was to stay home and not to be allowed to participate in much. My mother’s fear took over. I don’t know when it happened; if it was a year or a month, but a neighborhood child said to me: “I hear your daddy is all dead and buried.” I imagine this is when I stopped wanting to eat and I started stuffing my needs. My mother’s grief and requirements were to be the center of what I had to live with!
As I returned to my home leaving my son in New York City with his wife. I watched him creating his own life and knowing he was given all the love I never knew. Yes she loved me in her own fearful way, yet as I create just another story hoping it will come together in a readable form to be read.
I talked to my husband about my one true sentence that my writing teacher offered: From Hemingway and a poem spilled onto a scrap of paper just before I went to sleep.
