Desperate Measures

Prologue

      I was old enough to be relieved when my father left my mother. Old enough to have heard 15 years worth of excuses regarding his late nights and bloodshot eyes. Old enough to know there was no excuse for the constant degrading and blooming bruises tended to- not by gentle and comforting touches but by layers of concealer and color correctors. 
      For years I despised my mother for putting us in this position by staying with such an abrasive and cruel man. For keeping us trapped and miserable in the callused hands of a cold, cruel man.  In the beginning I pleaded with her to leave him, to get us out. I became so frustrated every time she would find an excuse, not just for him but for himself. The begging and the pleading with her to get out, to leave reached the point of anger; of hatred. It was a simple, naive way of viewing a relationship I lacked the maturity to comprehend. Life isn't like the movies, it doesn't follow a script, there is no time to rehearse lines or film another take. This house was all we had. My father was all she had.
      The realization of my mother's situation, of her being stuck raising an ungrateful, angry kid with no family to fall back on but an angry drunk, finally acknowledging her sacrifice made me regard my father without so much as a goodbye as he walked out. As he turned his back on my mother, as he turned his back on me. I would be a liar to say that I wasn't devastated myself. To declare that when he left he didn't have a piece of my heart stuffed into his duffel bag.
      I loved my father, I loved his laugh and his absurd life stories. I loved the steaks he would make on the grill out back and I loved how he would help me play hooky and stay home from school. How we would sit in the living room with the couch pulled close to the small TV playing video games until mom got home and we'd rush to put everything back into place. Rush to make it look believable. She never fell for it, but she was never upset either. She would just smile and shake her head and declare what she was making for dinner. I loved my father, that is why I hate him.
      As my mom sank further into the cushions of that ugly old burgundy couch, clutching a stained pillow with shaking hands I felt that hatred burrow deep in my chest. As I watched her flinch at the sound of a car door shutting and the engine of his old rusted pick up truck a part of me, a big part wanted to crawl up next to my mother on the couch and join her wailing. I wanted to lay my head on her chest and cry in her arms. I wanted to ask her why he had to be this way. Why he had to go. but in that moment, as I saw the woman who brought me life, who sacrificed her own for me. Who took every hit and every insult and swallowed it, I decided In that moment that I wouldn't cry, I wouldn't wail and collapse.
      So I grabbed our broom. I swept up every shard of broken glass from the fight only moments before. I cleaned up the beer cans and what was left of the broken picture frames. I vacuumed and I wiped the counters. I turned the TV on for my mother, I tucked her into the comfiest blanket in the house- as she had done for me for many years through her own grief. I went into their room- into her room and bagged up any sign of the cowardly man. I cleaned every inch of our small two bedroom home and I ordered the cheapest, greasiest pizza in town and I made a promise to my mother, to myself, that I would never let a man break us apart again.
And It only took me three years to break that promise.