-A Lie
I decided to focus on family, choosing to believe-and have faith-that everything else would fall into place. I wasn't comfortable-or good-at lying to her.
So, when Samantha surprised me one day by swallowing her pride and asking directly if a...
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I grew up in a family of seven—the second youngest of five children—moving along a well-worn path with a few brief, uneven flares of individuality. I did my chores dutifully, completed my schoolwork with minimal enthusiasm, and mostly drifted through childhood in a fog of daydreams.
Scouting was one of my earliest commitments, and one of my earliest abandonments. I quit as a Life Scout, just one merit badge and a project away from Eagle—nearly breaking every bylaw in the handbook, along the way. School was no better; I earned decent grades but carried the usual adolescent insecurities. In sports, I was a late bloomer who didn't develop a competitive nature until well after high school, long past when it might have mattered.
Sundays meant church. My family attended Mass every week, though what I remember isn't devotion but the rhythm of it—the standing, kneeling, scripted phrases spoken in unison. Occasionally monotony gave way to comedy: a dropped hymnbook, a muffled burp, or an accidental fart that sent us kids into breathless convulsions. My father would try to shut us down with a sharp sideways glance. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it earned us a trip outside.
Once, after an especially ill-timed giggle fit, he handed me the choice of a thin branch from a nearby bush. The "punishment" that followed was more performance than pain—a gesture of authority rather than cruelty.
But as I grew older—and wilder—his discipline escalated. Belts. Hangers. Hot Wheels tracks. A piece of garden hose. Once, he used a short segment of PVC pipe. I still remember the welts left across the backs of my thighs, punishment for ignoring his warning not to splash the freshly varnished front door.
[Decades later, at family gatherings, my brothers and I resurrected those moments—bizarrely romanticized, lighthearted retellings that never failed to amuse us, or our children.]
The last time he struck me was in tenth grade. I remember because I missed a scheduled biology field trip. My mother had been convinced I'd snuck out after being told not to. I hadn't left my room, but she must have stayed up half the night waiting for me to return from nowhere. When my father came home, she must have shared her version of events. The next morning, in the kitchen, he confronted me. I don't remember his words—only the shock of his fist catching my face before I could respond.
My brother Mike heard the commotion and rushed to my defense, yelling that I'd been home all night.
The violence isn't what lingered. What stayed with me from that memory is sitting beside him later that morning. We both watched from his car as the biology boat shrank into the distance—I turned to see tears on his cheeks. Until then, I had never seen him cry.
He was more than the sum of his worst moments. He was capable of tenderness and regret. I saw it that morning, and years later I recognized that same frustration in myself as a young father. I can't claim I never raised a hand to my boys, but I did manage to break the cycle of routine punishments so common in my father's generation.
