Her father's absence had always been the deepest wound.
Admittedly,
One that had gone unexplored.
Just this part of her that was buried deep inside,
And it seemed like life kept happening on top of it.
The stories she grew up with were thin,
Patched together explanations about business gone bad,
About the need to start over somewhere else.
But the truth,
The truth she pieced together only later were sharper,
Much harder to sit with.
Her father Frank had stolen money from his business partner,
Almost all the money in the business.
The kind of betrayal that couldn't be hidden or quietly swept under the rug.
When what he had done was discovered,
Frank sat at their kitchen table one gloomy afternoon,
Memories returning back to his hard-working parents.
They were ordinary people,
Earl and Doris,
Who would work themselves to the bone just to put food on the table and provide the new coat or boots that as a growing boy he kept growing out of.
Frank swore to himself,
Even as a young boy,
That he would not live like that.
While other boys dreamed of baseball tournaments or fast cars,
He dreamed of shortcuts,
A way to climb the ladder of life,
Returning to thoughts that grew stronger within him.
He knew somehow there must be an easier way.
By the time he was in his 30s,
He had built a steadily growing business with a friend from his school days,
A solid reputation in the community,
A life with Margaret and their family,
With Lauren having just been born.
Margaret had grown up differently.
She was raised in a small religious town with parents who bowed their heads before every meal and spoke of life as a series of choices between right and wrong,
With the connected consequences of heaven and hell.
To her,
The world was made of absolutes.
When she discovered what Frank had done,
Stealing from the man who trusted him most,
Her world collapsed,
And along with it,
Their marriage.
It wasn't just the stolen money.
It was the betrayal of everything she believed marriage and family stood on.
She could not forgive him.
To forgive would mean to blur the lines she had built her entire life on.
She couldn't even look him in the eye again.
Frank felt he had no other choice but to leave.
He couldn't bring himself to explain what had happened to his daughter.
Instead,
He crept into her bedroom while she looked so peacefully asleep,
Kissed her one last time on the cheek,
And muttered his goodbye as tears streamed down his face.
He moved many states over to the Pacific Northwest,
Living in a cabin on the coast in Oregon,
Reinvented himself,
Buried the shame along with how much he missed his daughter.
A new business,
A new life,
As if geography could wash away the guilt.
He told himself he was giving Margaret and Lauren a better chance by leaving.
That way they would be spared the fallout of his crime and the judgment from neighbors and all the people they used to call friends.
Shame clung to him like a second skin.
There was a knowing somewhere inside of him.
This would be a loss so deep it would follow him wherever it was he would call home.
For Margaret,
Forgiveness was impossible.
She carried her anger like a shield,
Certain that it was her only way to survive the humiliation.
Children don't care about the size of the crime.
They care about the absence.
As Lauren grew older,
She came to understand what her mother couldn't.
That holding on to judgment didn't repair anything.
That secrets don't dissolve when buried.
In quiet,
Reflective moments,
She felt them in herself.
In her endless hunger for a love that wouldn't leave her.
A love she could trust would be there no matter what.
If forgiveness could be imagined as a bridge,
Lauren saw that no one before her had ever dared to build it,
Let alone cross it.
Her mother had chosen to retreat into anger and judgment that was so strong the bridge wasn't even in sight.
Her father had retreated in his own way,
Running from what he'd done,
Maybe also running from Margaret's obvious and hurtful judgments.
As Lauren grew up,
She couldn't help but wonder if her mom could have chosen differently.
Perhaps not held such extreme judgment for what her dad had done,
But understood why it happened,
Given her dad's childhood,
The way he grew up in poverty,
And how that had shaped him.
Not to excuse it,
But more to understand how it might have shaped how he had gotten into the situation in the first place.
Lauren was starting to see that the story of her father was still alive in her,
In the way she was attracted to men who couldn't stay when their own emotional storms take them under,
Or men who could love her when things were going along great,
But when the same storms of life hit were nowhere to be found.
In the way she measured her worth against whether or not love could stay,
Her dad's absence was her emotional inheritance.
All that was left,
All these years later,
Was a missing father she never got to know.
An incomplete family story that patched together why her father did what he did,
And why it felt so big that he couldn't stay.
All that was left,
All those years later,
Was missing a father she never got to know.
An incomplete family story that patched together why her father did what he did,
And why it felt so big that he couldn't stay.
All she ever had of her dad was the hole that he left.
She didn't remember him tucking her in,
Teaching her things,
Or reading a book together.
What she carried was only missing pieces of this story,
His mistake,
His betrayal.
This man who decided leaving was easier than exploring what had gone wrong.
For years she blamed her mom for that silence,
Her refusal to bend,
For the way she lived in only black and white.
One mistake and he was finished,
Marriage over,
Family broken.
And Lauren felt like she was the one left paying for it.
The truth was,
His real crime wasn't the money he'd stolen,
His real crime was leaving her to grow up without a father.
And now,
Carrying a child of her own,
She couldn't stop herself from wondering,
Would there be parts of the same unfinished story she'd passed down?
Would her baby feel the weight of silence,
Of what she never got to speak about with her mom or her dad,
That instead continue to rumble around inside of her?
