My mother is in the hospital a few years later. She has almost died. She has almost died at the powerful hand of my father. “How did she almost die at the powerful hand of your father?” you may ask. Here is my answer to you.  My father will lead her in a frenzied dance backing her across the living room floor with fore and middle fingers to her heart. There is an accelerated rhythm to this dance. It is the beating of my father’s fingers on the drum of my mother’s heart. It is the soft sound of my mother’s tears as they fall wetting my father’s powerful hand. The dance ends as my father’s powerful hand becomes an uncontrollable, speeding freight train in the middle of the night that makes distorted accusations without substance until his hand slams up to the gaping cliff where my mother begins to teeter. The healing vessels of her broken heart will collapse in on themselves in the wreckage as if her heart no longer wishes to beat.

My mother is teetering, teetering. She does not know if she will live or die. The waves lash the rocks below the cliffs…the uncharted ocean threatens to take her out to sea to a watery death.
My mother does not tell me why the pain has sprung from the drum that is her heart. I will learn that later. She will not tell me of my father’s uncontrollable urge to damage her where she is already weak. I will learn that later, too.

My mother has a talk with me from her hospital bed. She will not tell me these things during this talk.  These things will be her secret for now.  I sit next to her in a blue, plastic chair holding her hand. She is not sure what will happen tomorrow at another man’s powerful hand …the hand of the doctor. She says she is sorry she has leaned on me so heavily since I was a child. She wants me to know that.

There is no need for forgiveness between my mother and I.  I have the bitter strength that requires me to understand the despair of one not suited to the other …the unavoided regret rising to a crescendo of silent scream that comes of accidents that last a lifetime.

It is easy to love my mother.

I love my father, too. It is difficult to love my father.

How can I love a father like that?