Monday, August 31st, 1987
My two younger brothers and I are in the basement of the only home any of us have ever known.
In Kansas, the basement is where you go when the sky turns mean. We’d done this drill countless times before.
Tornado sirens screaming, the house creaking like it might peel apart. Our mom calmly herding us down the steps while our dad heads outside, as if violent storms were something to witness not fear.
And tonight, like so many other nights, there was a storm overhead but it had nothing to do with the weather.
Upstairs, our parents who had been married fifteen years, were tearing into each other with words sharp enough to rattle the foundation. The anger in their voices traveled through the floorboards, through the walls and through us. We weren’t just hearing their rage, we were absorbing it.
Families fight. I understood that. Parents argue. Totally normal.
What wasn’t normal was this.
Our parents had never raised their voices at each other. Not once. Not in front of us. Not behind closed doors. They didn’t bicker. They didn’t snap. They didn’t perform their problems where us kids could see them.
But they also didn’t do other things either.
Things like touch, kiss or show affection towards one another. Instead, they moved through the same rooms like polite strangers who happened to share children. If love had ever lived with them in this house, it had learned to stay invisible and quiet.
And now, there was yelling.
Not restrained yelling where it’s careful and measured but the knock-down, drag-out, nothing held-back yelling. The kind that rearranges your understanding of the people who raised you and makes you realize that something permanent is about to break permanently.
“You can argue about it until the cows come home but that’s not gonna change it.” my mom screamed in a voice that, up until tonight, had been reserved for us boys when we fucked up.
But hearing it aimed at my dad felt wrong. Like seeing a teacher drunk. Like discovering gravity could suddenly reverse itself.
From what I could gather, the storm front that was now roaring had moved in earlier in the day by way of Sister Corita calling my mom.
The weekend before, my. parents had let me throw a birthday party for turning fourteen. Boys and girls from school. Music. Food. Swimming. The illusion of supervision. And, when my parents weren’t looking, I swiped a Coors Light from the fridge and a few of us passed it around like it was contraband instead of barely carbonated water.
One of the girls in attendance told her parents.
Her parents told the school.
And then, the school’s long arm of the law reached out and bitch-slapped my mom, selling the assault as care and disappointment.
Our mom, not one to go looking for a fight but also not one to allow her or her family’s name to get dragged through sanctified mud, stood her ground.
“My son isn’t dumb enough to do that.” my mom had said, defending a son who was, in fact, dumb enough to do something just like that.
“So you can take your accusations and put them where the sun doesn’t shine.” she told Sister Corita, as she later recounted the exchange to my dad.
Our dad had always been a people person. The kind who remembered names, shook hands, stayed late and was liked by all. At Assumption, he wasn’t just a parent, he was an asset. He’d sat on boards, been part of committees and had titles that sounded important and vague at the same time.
So he was livid that our mom had gone scorched earth on Corita without considering the relationships that needed to be preserved and certain statuses that had to be upheld. There were more effective ways, he’d yelled, to deal with Corita that didn’t involve getting nailed to a cross by her.
And from there, the storm had grown in scope and fury.
A storm that had been building inside our mom for years. Made of resentment, dismissal and the quiet erosion that comes from feeling taken for granted year after year.
Our mom had always felt like she was the one running the machine. Dishes. Discipline. Homework. Consequences. And that our dad was the fun one that would breeze in, make promises, and then disappear into his job, leaving her to cash checks that he’d never written.
Our dad, for his part, had brought the ghost of his first wife into their marriage. She had died a slow, brutal death from cancer and he had never metabolized that trauma. So, he and his untreated grief had been haunting our parents relationship from the get-go.
If all that wasn’t enough, over the summer our dad’s father was diagnosed with terminal cancer so he and my grandma moved in with us, making the house smaller and the air thicker.
Our dad, having already gone through the pain of watching a loved one succumb to cancer, had no interest in watching that episode again. So he would escape off to work as a way to avoid the inevitable.
Meanwhile, our mom had become our grandpa’s steward. Sitting beside him every night as he slipped away in inches, talking to people who weren’t there and crossing thresholds none of us could follow.
On his last day I watched as our mom held him like he was one of her own wounded children, fighting against death’s grip with equal parts defiance and exhaustion.
“C’mon, Dad. Stay with me. Stay with me.” she had pleaded as he slipped away while our grandma stood by and cried.
When it was all over, our mom felt defeated, abandoned and empty. Like her humanity had been peeled back, leaving only frayed nerves in the shape of a body.
So there was anger in her. Justifiable anger. She had felt alone in their marriage for a long time. Left to carry weight meant for two.
And in our dad, there was avoidance. Justifiable too. His heart had never recovered from the fist time it broke so there was no room in it for another loss or person.
And now, the storm that had been gathering for years had finally broke, tearing though our home with unstoppable force.
When the yelling had subsided, the silence that followed felt wrong. It was the kind of quiet that comes after a tornado when you’re still in hiding and unsure of what’s left standing.
Eventually, our mom called us upstairs.
My father sat at the kitchen table, the same table where we’d eaten thousands of meals as a family, and he was bawling.
I had only seen him cry once before. He’d made me swear never to tell anyone.
But this time he was beyond secrecy and pride. Beyond consolation. Beyond repair.
He was fucking wrecked.
A casualty of a storm he probably wished he’d ridden out in the basement with his boys instead of standing in its path.
Our mom stood by the sink. Not close to us. Not close to him. Keeping her distance, gathering the nerve for the words she was about to release.
“Your father and I are getting divorced.”
No thunder then.
Just the house finally split open.
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