THE ANCHOR IN THE BREAKING STORM
To my father, who stayed through every goodbye.
Some wounds don’t bleed; they simply become part of the furniture. You learn to live around them, to step over them, to call them home.
The illusion of a normal home
I was a child when I learned how to do that. I didn’t know my family was breaking. I only knew that this was the life I had been given, and I had never been taught to imagine another one.
I was brought up in a broken family. I just didn’t know it was broken until I reached my early twenties. For most of my childhood, I believed my parents were simply going through what married couples sometimes go through. They would argue and later on find their way back to each other.
Then life would continue as though nothing had happened. We called it normal because we had never known anything else.
For twenty years, I held on to the idea that my family was normal. Because, somewhere inside me, I knew the truth but wasn’t ready to give it a name.
My parents arguing never frightened me. That was ordinary. What I didn’t know how to make ordinary was watching my mother pack her bags and leave. That was when the cracks in our family stopped being invisible.
She would leave us with our father, and my father would stay. He always stayed. I love my father for that, for being the one constant in a childhood that was otherwise full of departures.
Every time my mother left after an argument, he remained with us, quietly carrying on with the business of raising his children.
It happened so often that her leaving eventually became something we learned to expect. Only, she never left for a night or a weekend. She left for months.
Then, without warning, she would come back.
It’s as if she came to only feed the illusions, the moments they started starving.
And we would light up.
Her return felt like a little piece of our world being put back where it belonged.
The house would become warm again.
My parents would laugh and chat, moving around each other as though nothing had happened and we would happily slip back into our old routine.
No one explained the months in between.
No one asked questions. We were children, and all we knew was that Mum was home.
So we celebrated her return, never realizing that we were also learning how to survive her absence.
Then the cycle went on. And on. And on.
The ordinary rhythm of leaving
In the beginning, whenever my mother packed her bags, we would try to stop her.
We would plead with her to stay. We would hold on to the hope that, somehow, this time would be different.
But eventually, even that stopped.
No one was angry with her. No one blamed her.
We simply stopped asking her to stay.
Her leaving became ordinary. Something we had learned to make room for. We stopped wondering how long she would be gone. We stopped counting the days. We stopped being surprised.
She would leave. We would stay. And life would go on.
That was how I grew up, learning, little by little, that sometimes the people you love can leave, and you can still learn to live as though they haven’t.
Because I had grown up this way, I never thought there was anything wrong with it.
It was simply my life.
I didn’t know that some of the things I called normal were things a child should never have had to normalize.
Get ˚✧ 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘢 𝘛𝘦𝘭𝘢 ✧˚𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼 🌼 𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It took me twenty years to look back and see my father differently.
For most of my childhood, he was our only constant.
He was a single father in all the ways that mattered, carrying the responsibilities of two parents while we were too young to understand the weight on his shoulders.
He would tell us about his struggles sometimes, and we would listen without really knowing what they meant. I didn't realize that his words were leaving pieces of his burden with us.
As I grew older, I began to see how much my father had been carrying alone.
Everything seemed to find its way back to him.
The hardest truth for me was accepting that my mother was almost never there.
I had spent years holding on to the idea that I had two parents. But all this time I had only created that illusion because I needed it to be true.
When I turned eighteen, my father began passing some of that weight to me. He trusted me with his finances. He asked me to help him. And I hated it, not because I didn’t love him, but because I was still a girl who wanted to be carefree. I wanted to worry about the things other children worried about.
I didn't want to become another pair of hands carrying what my father had been carrying alone for years.
But I had to grow into those responsibilities, whether I was ready or not. Sometimes I wondered why my mother couldn’t carry some of them too. Why did everything seem to find its way to me?
Then I realized,
My mother wasn’t around. She was almost never there. She had never been there.
For years, I told myself I was doing these things because I was the eldest daughter. I thought that was simply what eldest daughters did.
It took growing older to understand that I wasn’t just the eldest daughter. I was a child growing up in a home where my father was raising five children almost entirely on his own.
The emotional punch
Then, one afternoon at 1:30 p.m., my phone rang.
It was my father.
He sounded exhausted. Overwhelmed by the day, by the endless things that needed to be done. Somewhere in the conversation, he said:
“I have to go back home and take care of your small brothers…”
And something in me went quiet.
I suddenly understood that this was not something he had started doing when I became eighteen. This was his life.
He had been doing it all along. Going home. Feeding us. Paying for things. Taking care of us.
Being the parent who stayed. By himself.
Sometimes, when the weight became unbearable, he would unravel in front of us.
He would tell us things children probably shouldn't have to carry. I used to wonder why he did that.
I understand now.
He was tired.
The loneliest form of love
He had been a father, a mother, a provider, a protector and somehow, he was still expected to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.
I spent twenty years believing I came from a family with two parents. It took me becoming an adult to understand that, for most of my life, my father had been parenting alone.
I wish I had understood it sooner. I wish I had known that behind every bill he paid, every meal he made, every time he came home tired and still showed up for us, there was a man carrying more than we could see.
I was too young to understand then. But I understand now. My father stayed. And perhaps, all those years, that was the greatest love I had ever known.
