I don’t remember either of them saying “for better or for worse,” I wasn’t around yet.
I only remember yelling.
The room that night was dark, slowly filling with smoke that was seeping up through the floorboards from the emotional bonfire that burned in the kitchen below. I stared at the ceiling, then the wall, then my brother’s bed on the opposite side of the room, where the wall was always covered in crayon, something I could never understand. It seemed logical to me that if you had something explicitly called a coloring book, there was no need to color anywhere else, but it seemed that my little troublemaker of a brother had a different understanding of the world. His art, though, wasn’t enough to keep my attention.
I was small then, though how small I can’t say. I don’t think there is really a small small enough to not understand yelling, to not recognize fury, to not be frightened by it. I can say that I must have been at least eight or nine. My little brother is almost five years younger than I am, and I know that he was out of the crib and into a “big boy” bed at the time. I swear, a banshee couldn’t wake him up that night, or any night after that, and in retrospect, I marvel at that. The young me laying there in that bed, listening to the civil war being waged below me, would have given anything to sleep like he did. But I couldn’t. I laid there, eyes wide open and ears wider, the sounds of my mom’s raging voice echoing into my left ear, spurring my dad’s raised voice to retort from my right ear, the two of them reverberating back and forth through my head like the rush of a growing house fire as I stared at the shadowy blue ceiling again. I just stared off as I listened to the screams—as I’m sure the whole neighborhood listened to the screams, the sound of my home burning from the ground up. No tears, no crying, nothing. I silently took it all in the way I took in everything, wishing it would all just go away.
The voices would move periodically from one end of the room to the other, back and forth, back and forth, faster now, slower again, the heat off the spouting flames dancing to and fro beneath my floor in step. And finally I heard stomping traverse the lower floor of the house and a door slam—I think it was the front door—and all went quiet. Quiet, but no peace, certainly no peace, just fear filling the room. It was a noxious, asphyxiating smoke that filled my bedroom in the fire’s wake, wrapped me up like the blanket I’d buried myself in, and poured into my lungs; it wickedly cradled me into a sleep that lumbered over me and finally took me out of sheer exhaustion. I remember that fear: the fear that my family, my home, everything that mattered, had just burned up and fallen to pieces, and I had witnessed it.
Though they all seem to blur together now, forming one composite picture, nights like that one were not uncommon in my home. They didn’t always end in a slammed door—though they often involved one somewhere in the process—and I don’t know if my brother always slept through them, but every clash petrified me as I laid there hugging my gigantic stuffed mouse, breathing heavily. Deep down, every child understands that fighting was not a part of the original plan for people, particularly not parental people. “Moms and dads love each other” is what we’re taught growing up, right? They don’t emotionally explode at one another at all hours of the night, right?
That’s what the sitcoms and fairy tales lead us to believe. But the stories we tell our children have made a tragic mistake: though each one has the potential to decimate the other, love and combat are not mutually exclusive.
My little brother and I grew up on the ritzy side of the tracks, surrounded by kids who got everything they ever wanted. I still remember the sheer mass of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Ghostbusters toys that one of my childhood friends had: a child-sized mound of action figures that required its own toy box, the biggest piece of Tupperware I’d ever seen. The days I spent at his house always opened with a round of Nintendo, playing any one of the long shelf of games that stretched out like the game wall at the video store. We’d move on to breaking open the gigantic Tupperware holding cell and spilling every known Saturday morning cartoon character’s action figure onto the floor, pause for a snack time that consisted of every sugary/salty snack I’d drooled over the commercial for, and sometimes we even included a hearty helping of Paperboy on the computer.
I never bothered to stop and ask why we didn’t have all the cool gear my friends did. I don’t think it was until middle school that I even realized how different we were in that regard. It wasn’t as though we ate out of dumpsters and wore paper bags as clothing; we just had low-end cars, didn’t eat out at McDonalds much, and made a pair of shoes from Ross last an entire school year.
It wasn’t until years later that my dad pieced it together for me—I’m not quite as quick as the standardized tests have led us to believe.
Oh the yelling again; please, not the yelling.
There we are, my brother and I locked in a little, dimly-lit, depressing box of a room with stiff, ugly, padded-wood chairs, a “classy” end table, and a lamp that really needs a higher watt bulb. Then, over the mind-numbing elevator music, it begins again.
I can hear my mom behind the door in front of me; her furious voice starts to expand, filling the room with a degree of tension that rattles each vertebra in my spine just a little. Here it comes again; I can tell the embers are kindling under their now audible voices; traces of that horrid fear are wafting into my nostrils already. My dad rises to her level, and the verbal brawl breaks into flames once more, broken only by the barely perceptible sound of some man whom my parents visit on a weekly basis, seemingly for the opportunity to scream at each other in a new location. The racket inside starts to move toward the door, quickly getting louder, hotter, though still somewhat muffled.
The door swings open, virtually freed of its hinges by my mom’s now gargantuan, beating red hand, and my parents’ firestorm rages out of the room behind her like Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, billowing smoke rolling out across the ceiling ahead of it. All of her flesh is pulsing red. Molten rubber drips from her shoes as she storms past us, unable to see her own sons laying on the floor playing with Tinker Toys through the rush of tears that flow down her face. Each step, the pain-laden footfall of a mastodon, ripples the floor like the Northridge earthquake all over again as she stomps past, out the door, down the hall, and on to I don’t even know where. The fire quickly subsides, but that smoke has rapidly risen from her smoldering tracks, settled over my eyes, and entered my burning lungs once more. Terrified and breathing hard, I look up at my dad through the crack between the office door and the jamb and I can see that the heat of the fire has him sweating too, but we’re in different worlds and I can’t read him—maybe that’s where I get my blank expression and the inability to cry, even though my eyes are burning with anxiety. Before coming out to collect the two of us and leave, he closes the door to talk with that guy in the nice suit some more about things that you can’t discuss with a fourth grader. I look down at my little brother on the floor again and I just want to reach out, to hold him, to tell him that it’s all going to be ok, that the fire won’t get him, but he doesn’t even seem to have seen what just happened. No, he’s still playing with the Tinker Toys as though the last minute had been a fiery specter that only I had seen, as though the fear had only fallen on me. It had; it’s in my chest and I can’t escape it.
I want to tell myself that it’s all going to be ok. But I never know if it is; the smoke reminds me of only one thing: fire. My house is on fire.
The problem of being small is that you expect everything to be as simple as you’re told it is: good guys and bad guys, justice and evil, right and wrong, Heaven and Hell. In my youthful split, it was clear that every time my parents erupted, it was evil, it was wrong, it was Hell. And that doesn’t mean anything different to an elementary schooler than it does to an adult; Hell is where everything falls apart, where love is replaced with hatred, where people rip each other apart, and everything you hold dear is taken from you, leaving you sitting in fiery torment: the torment of loneliness, of complete isolation, where all the company you have left are the flames that weave and spiral.
That was the fire that lit up below my bedroom the nights that my parents fought; that was the inferno that burst out of the office door as my brother and I played Tinker Toys on the floor; that was the blaze that would blow up and die down, leaving me feeling utterly alone in the lung-singeing smokescreen.
But my understanding of those experiences of hellfire was immature.
At one time, my father was a young boy, like me. And likewise, my mother was once a little girl. And if I grew up inhaling the lonely reminders of a rising house fire, they barely walked away from the scorched remains of their homes with their lives.
My dad was raised in a home run by a disengaged, out-of-town father and a spiteful, manipulative bitch of a mother. To say the least, it was a dysfunctional marriage—at least while it lasted. I can’t say that it’s an uncommon story today, but my grandparents’ divorce torched my young father to a cinder, turning him, as I understand it, to something of a wanderer who only wanted to escape the desolate, scorched lot that had once been a family, where anyone with eyes could see flames still dancing upon the blackness. He spent much of his time as far from his homes as possible, staying with his aunt and uncle as much as he could and then moving out at first opportunity.
My mom found no better circumstances for her family foundation. Abused by her drunken father until he divorced her mother and left, she was then handed from one pathetic father-figure to another as my grandmother’s boyfriends passed through the house like petty arsonists lighting blazes with what little was left from my grandfather’s work. Every inch of the home was burned to the ground around her. She responded much like my dad and she left, spending as many days, nights, and everything-in-between as she could at her grandparents’ house, just to escape the wasteland that was her home.
When the two of them met—bound by faith and a common scar—no one with an ounce of sense believed their relationship could work; no two people forged in the fires of decimated families, still aglow with embers ready to reignite, could ever last together without erupting again and completely consuming each other. The fires hadn’t extinguished, premarital counselors warned, they had only diminished, biding time, waiting for the temperature to rise again, waiting for a new generation victims. But my parents believed differently, taking a solid, joint stance long before they ever stepped to the altar: divorce was never an option. They would allow another house fire to do to their children what had been done to them; their home, their kids would not be claimed by the flames of separation.
Laying in my bed, hearing the rush of fire unleashed in our kitchen on those nights, I didn’t understand what I was listening to. I couldn’t have. My parents, yelling at each other in the room below, storming out and coming back, packing bags but not walking away, were not releasing the blaze that rose to choke me with fear of its destructive power, they were opposing it as it swirled around them, sparked by their pasts. Dead set on not allowing it to persist, they did everything possible to struggle with the rekindled firestorm that followed them, that raged in them, between them, against them. They fought, they yelled, they cried, they slammed doors because at those times it was all that held them together, all that kept the inferno from ripping between them. The alternative silence would have sacrificed everything to the flames; to let the fire freely pass between them and engulf them, that was what split marriages, that was what bred bitterness and indifference, that was what had scorched them and left them veritable orphans in the cinders of a house fire, and would destroy their boys.
They didn’t tell me until years later because I couldn’t have understood, but I didn’t grow up with nice toys, expensive clothes, new cars, and dinners out because they were funneling as much money as they could into marriage counseling and personal therapy. My parents knew it was vastly more important to give my brother and me themselves, whole and together, than it was to afford for us material things. The innumerable summer afternoons I spent sitting in therapists’ waiting rooms, wondering why the hell I was there, bored, and sometimes gasping for air, were my parents’ gifts to me, and I never understood it. They paid inordinate sums of money, spent too much time to count, poured out tears and screams that sometimes nearly cost them their sanity, all so that I would have more than they did, so that I would not be alone, without a family, burned head to toe and just waiting for my own ignition. So that their Hell would not be mine.
And while I certainly tasted it, while I still sometimes find it hard to breathe for the charred scars left in my lungs by the lonely anxieties that filled the room all those days and nights as a child, I was not devoured by the blaze; I was not left to wander alone through the black, barren remains of a family. All those times I winced at the heat as I was buried in the fire’s smoky haze, I never experienced the full ravaging force of the firestorm. Through the cloud that billowed about me, I never recognized the silhouettes of my parents’ backs as they stood side by side against a burning tower of flame, hand in scorched hand, unwilling to step apart and let it rip down the center of their home and consume the two little boys playing Tinker Toys on the floor behind them. I now see that the dense smoke that engulfed me was the tangible proof of my parents’ fierce commitment to stand between me and Hell.
Today, many of the kids I grew up with in my rich little town still suffer from the effects of the dissolved marriages of their parents. They certainly have all the things that commercial television marks as the best of life, but they bear the same debilitating scars and burns that my parents had to carry and, to some degree, still carry. I don’t. When the fires of our family history spewed smoke into my bedroom at night, it was not the foreshadowing of my parents’ marital dissolve, it was the unavoidable collateral damage of their fierce efforts against the flames for each other, for my brother, and for me. For this depth of love I am ever grateful, still grateful as they continue to struggle to hold their marriage together even after their boys have grown and stepped out from behind their shelter. And one day, when my brothers and I are forced to bury them and hand them back to their Maker, I will revel in the painstaking fulfillment of their commitment to one another on my behalf. Because I already do.
I already do.
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