I Saw My Father Cry

I saw my father cry and inside I cried too. She was being mean and I didn’t recognize her like that.

My father didn’t live with us anymore. He lived on the other side of town with a woman and her three children. He didn’t come around much. I was still in college four hundred miles away so I rarely got to see him. I knew what he had done to my mother, how it had torn her apart, crushed her. But I thought she was okay now. It had been years. They had attempted to reconcile several times. He would eventually leave and stay away for months. But he sometimes came and visited with my mother and they would drink and laugh and talk then he’d leave again. So I thought she was okay.

The day before Christmas he had dropped off presents for all of us. My mom and I had been out shopping so he had left the packages at the door. When my mother and I came home, she had seen the bags with wrapped presents and said something like “It’s about time he remembered he has another family.” When we opened our presents on Christmas, we all liked what he had given us. My present was a pretty robe. It was a yellow velvety one. I loved it. It was so soft and it was from my dad. He didn’t give us things often so when he did, we treasured them. We sat around commenting on what a great job he had done with presents for us. My mother became agitated and finally she said that she wanted us to give everything back to him. I figured she’d forget so I put it out of my mind for the rest of the day.

On the day after Christmas, my mom told my sister to call our dad and tell him to come get the packages. She wanted her to do it before she went to work so she wouldn’t forget. So she did. My sister reported back that my father was coming by in a couple of hours. She had told him to come by and pick up some packages. She had not told him it was the packages he had brought two days before. She went to work and my mom and I were the only ones home. We were in the living room when we saw my father drive up. As he parked, my mother told me to get the box with my robe in it and throw it in his face and tell him I didn’t like it. She wanted me to laugh in his face when I threw it at him. I said I couldn’t do that. She said I had to.

As the doorbell rang, my mother looked at me and said to do it. I opened the door. My dad was smiling at me. He asked if I had a good Christmas. I said I did and opened the door to give him the packages. He realized that it was the same packages he had delivered to us. His smile went away and he asked me what was wrong. Had my robe not fit? I said no, it was the wrong size. It was very pretty but it was the wrong size. My mother pulled the door open and yelled at me to tell him what she had told me to. I said, “Mom, I can’t do that.” She cursed at me, grabbed the box out of my hands and threw it in my father’s face. She yelled at him, “She doesn’t like it. It’s ugly and it’s cheap!” I began to cry. I told her, “Mom, don’t be like that. Please. Please don’t.” She continued to yell at me and my father. As he turned to walk away, I saw the tears. He looked back at me and said, “It’s okay, mi hijita. It’s okay. I love you. Bye.”

Mom was furious and asked why I was crying. I said, “Mom I can’t be mean to him. He’s my father. Please don’t be so mean to him. How can you be like that?” And that’s when she said it. She said the words I have never forgotten. The words that haunted me every day of my married life. The words that became real. She yelled at me, “I hope when you get married your husband sleeps with another woman and leaves you so you’ll know how I feel. That’s when you’ll know how I can be like that.”

[Note: Due to NaNoWriMo, I will often be posting some things that I wrote a while back, reworked just for this blog.]

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