father’s son
Prompt from writersdigest.com:
Your mom is in poor health and you spend extra time at her apartment taking care of her. While getting her out of bed and into her chair one day, she thanks you for all your help. Then she says that she needs to tell you a story about her past. One that you don’t know and one that will change everything.
She was never in her full health in the first place. It’s either a severe cold or a mild cough, and most of the time she would be bedridden for a day or two. Then, his father landed himself with an alcohol addiction and not a few millions of debt from alcohol’s relative: gambling. Now he ended up six feet under with his addictions and left him and his mother to fend for themselves.
They worked hard; his mother used everything in her repertoire of skills to salvage some money and send him to school. In return, he studied his way out of school with marks that let him pass college and get him a real job as a head editor and made him a man unlike his father. Or so he hoped.
It was a Sunday, he remembered clearly. A perfectly leisure day when he would take care of his mother like any other day. Her health had never improved and both of them knew that it would only get worse since the day his father tested the devil’s limits. And their predictions were true; she was bedridden for the rest of her life with stroke and a chance of heart attacks.
So he would navigate around the kitchen in the morning and fix her daily broth, then he would bring it to her bed, sit her up and feed her until the bowl is empty. He would watch her swallow the liquid-like porridge painfully slow with each gulp, offer her a glass of water, and gently nudge her pale lips open with the rim. Then she would ask him to take her to her favourite armchair by the window where she could enjoy whatever weather the clouds and sun had to offer.
That Sunday began with the usual prologue and ended with a different epilogue and a new conflict that he never knew.
He was reading a submission when she called him. He didn’t mind being interrupted in the middle of his work for her. Even if she asked him for something as mundane as a toilet trip or taking her blanket when it’s a particularly chilly day, he was fine with it; it was his duty as her son, after all.
But he didn’t expect her request at that time: she wanted to tell him a story.
Something that had always stark out to him about her was that she was quiet. She was noiseless when she talks and silent in her steps. And she was absolutely mute about her story. She never answered his questions about her childhood and teenage years.
“Where was your hometown?” he asked once, because every single kid in his class was bragging about how their ancestors were from all over the world — a boy said his grandfather was a colonel in World War 2 but when asked which side was his grandfather on, he just spluttered and blushed. But he himself didn’t even know where his mother came from, which was even more embarrassing than not knowing the history of wars.
She would call out, “the beef is burned!” and disappear to the kitchen, even when they didn’t have enough money to buy beef, let alone an oven. But then, he would peeked in and saw her running the water on with her back against him and her shoulders were shaking. When he was a naïve little kid, he thought that she was laughing over a joke that she remembered. It’s not until later when he saw drops of water that didn’t belong to the sink water fell and a sob that tore through her so hard, it left her openly crying. The sound shattered his heart more than the news of his father’s death and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to handle the raw emotions splayed on his mother’s face with that kind of wracking noise. And from that day onwards, he swore to himself he would never let those tears stain her cheeks ever again.
But naturally promises would break and so was his own to her.
He was waiting patiently in the beige cushion across from her, expecting it to be another story when he was a baby and his father was still a good man with honorable intentions, but never about her. He was thinking about how he had devoted his life to this one woman who had delivered him to this world and yet, he knew so little about. But then, she uttered the four words that took up her whole story and destroyed his, “Your father is alive.”
He didn’t believe her, at first. He thought that she was just telling him a very, very bad joke or maybe he didn’t hear it quite right and so he waited for her to finish her sentence.
She didn’t.
Seconds turned to minutes and both of them stared at each other until he finally gave up, “What?”
And she repeated those four words again — maybe she saw the disbelief in his eyes — then the dam broke and the flood came forth so hard that it staggered and left him speechless. She told him how they met at a science convention centre and it was love at first sight — he didn’t believe that exist too. She told him how coffee breaks turned to lunches together then to romantic dinners. She told him how beautiful and white their wedding was. She told him how proud they were when he was born on a rainy day and he was their very own sun. She told him how it all went downhill in one night because of a mistake she did.
She had a little bit too much to drink in a company function and didn’t even realise it when a co-worker brought her to his apartment. He took advantage of her vulnerability and by the time she woke up naked on a stranger’s bed, it was already too late. The man had long gone.
She ran through the streets with tousled hair and frazzled outfit before dawn breaks. When she entered the apartment with clumsy steps, his father was singing a lullaby for him and it wrenched her heart with the sin that she had done and the image of the two beautiful men in her life had broke her all the more.
She told him how she couldn’t stand the onslaught of emotions that night, and so when he had went into a deep slumber, she told his father everything and they were plunged into war. They fought; the mother cried, the father raged, the son asleep.
Their marriage fell into its demise and he fell into the custody of his mother. When he was old enough to wonder why he has no father to teach him how to ride a bicycle, her grief awakened. An unwanted child was conceived on that night and his father had demanded her to sacrifice it for his unconditional love.
And so she did. She gave it up to keep what is left of their fragile family.
But he lied. He swore that he would not let another man’s blood sully his family and yet he filed a divorce, anyway. She told him how the lies came pouring out and she wanted him to hate his father just as much as she did and he believe them simply because he didn’t know any better. He didn’t know any better because he was his mother’s son; she didn’t know any better because she was hurt and her pain blinded her.
His mind went blank. He felt like he lost his father all over again and it was as if he never knew his mother at all. She told him that his father has a new family — a pretty wife, two daughters and a son — but he wasn’t listening anymore. He drowned in the truth and floated on the lies; he didn’t know which one is better.
When he came around, it was to the sound of sobs and then it hit him.
She was crying.
He was holding a shattered lamp in his left hand and bloods were dripping from the cuts on his right hand, but he didn’t feel any pain. His mother’s favourite china was on the floor in pieces and his bare feet stepped on some too, but he didn’t feel the sting. The frames that he made as a child were scattered woods and dried glue on the mantelpiece and the photographs were stained with scratches, but he didn’t feel the hurt.
He felt numb. He was in the state where he didn’t know what to feel, what to do, or what to think. Because he was stuck under piles of junk and he couldn’t breathe through it and he should have felt suffocated but he felt numb.
His mother was crying, he broke his promise and it was all because of him. He failed in doing his duty as her son and so maybe he was his father’s son, after all.