The Wedding Issue

Chapter Thirteen - Deafening Silence

My father and I sat across from each other, but our minds couldn't be more distant. We both tried to handle the situation the best way we knew how; staying quiet but screaming in our heads. Adaline sat at the corner chair playing an intense, blue melody on her violin. Her music echoed the melancholy present in the room. She felt it too, and I'm sure she didn't like seeing our father like this.

I'm pregnant.

I'm pregnant

I'm pregnant.

Her words echoed punitively, like an annoying bee buzzing next to my ear that I couldn't shoo off.

I couldn't shake off the conversation we had this afternoon about her unexpected pregnancy. I can't believe sperm banks allow women her age to browse through their catalogues. Why did she even think that a baby would suddenly make her a more tolerable person? She said something about her needing a second chance at being a mother to do it right. That just sounded like a whole lot of crap to me. There wasn't a motherly bone in her body. It just seemed like another plea to get some undeserved attention.

The news of my mother being pregnant didn't come easy to me, but I couldn't even begin to imagine what my father must be going through. No news about my mother could be easy on him. Despite the years of separation and the hardships before that, I knew he still cared about her. She was his first love; the mother of his firstborn; the woman he vowed to spend the rest of his life with through thick and thin. I haven't known them as a happy couple. In fact, I can't recall a happy memory with the two of them in the same room. I can't even begin to fathom why such news would bother him. But it did, and I didn't have the words to soothe him.

I watched him. He was further than I had anticipated he would be. Wondering. Much like me, he was a thinker; trying to justify the reason as to why my mother would do something so risky and stupid at such a brittle age.

It's never too late, she said. There was always time.

This time, she was wasting away the rest of her years with a responsibility she wasn't good for.

My father let out a shuddered sigh. It was a painful sound. It made me want to curl up in a corner and cry.

'I'm sorry you had to hear that from me', I finally broke the silence.

He broke his gaze from the checkered floor to meet my eyes. He had no words. I couldn't blame him. He seemed like he was fighting back his tears. He hated crying. It wasn't because it was a sign of weakness or strength or whatever one thinks of it to be. He simply didn't like the feeling of the salty liquid falling down his cheeks. He couldn't stand the burning sensation it left behind.

Instead of eating out, we ordered in and stayed at my apartment although we didn't have much of an appetite. I opened a bottle of the finest red I owned to try to numb our senses, but the throb was too demanding to let go of us just yet.

'Helen works in mysterious ways that I can never seem to understand', he finally said after what seemed to be an interminable length of painful silence.

I didn't know how to respond to that. I had a hard time figuring out my mother myself. I opted to refill his glass and offer him more cheese. Adaline stopped playing and joined us at the kitchen counter. She, too, was out of words. We merely sat in each other's company, silent, shocked, sipping on our wine, nibbling on our cheese and fighting unforeseen wars inside our heads.

Flashes of memories evaded my mind.

I've been living with my father almost my entire life. It was only in certain occasions that I got to spend time with my mother. I only did it because I felt obligated to stay in touch with her for my father's sake, not because I was minutely interested in getting to know her. My father had the type of business that required him to travel a lot so I didn't have much of a choice either.

She was an awful parent. Her cooking was terrible. She embarrassed me in front of my friends. She was either too drunk or too sober to have a normal conversation with. I basically cleaned up her messes and then get yelled at for even bothering. I was always angry and agitated around her. I could never bring myself to recall a single memory where I felt remotely close to her.

I remember looking at my friends' mothers' and wonder why she couldn't be like any one of them. She didn't even try. She made sure I felt like I was nothing more than a childhood mistake; a burden that she had to endure for the rest of her life just because we share the same DNA.

There was a time in my early teens when my mother made me feel suicidal.

Now another soul was going to be tormented the same way I had for the rest of their life. A sickening feeling gripped my stomach as I dispensed the wine into the sink.