What Do You Say When The Question is The Wrong One?

My daughters have gifted me with a writing program with prompts in the form of questions designed to elicit a pouring out of ‘let’s get to know Mom’ writing. I warned the representative daughter that much of my history is… dark. Airily she said that didn’t matter, to just edit myself.

It was a reminder that no child wants the truth about their antecedents, at least not from those they know personally. Perhaps, if you tell them something spicy or shocking about your grandparents they’ll be intrigued and amused. But telling your children about a childhood you struggled to survive mentally intact, well that’s just too close and uncomfortable.

I knew I couldn’t write a lie. So, I was stuck, not writing at all, expected to contribute something ‘sugar-coated’ just in time for Father’s Day, angry about that, not at my daughters but at how life stole much of the sweetness that childhood is supposed to evoke in our memories. And then I just started to write. I thought I’d get something out of my system (only it’s never out of my system) and then maybe search my memory for something… good.

This is the prompt for the writing: WHAT DO YOU ADMIRE MOST ABOUT YOUR FATHER?

This is what I wrote:

My birth father was divorced by my mother when I was two and my twin brothers were just a year old.

I have three abiding memories of this father. The first one, when I was two, is of his raised voice, rattling the door…