I couldn’t be sure of the time, but I knew it was the middle of the night. Is mom crying? I couldn’t remember how we got there, and I had no idea where we even were. Did I just wake up? Nothing outside of the truck looked familiar. Wait, why is mom crying?
Chris? I tried to look over at my older brother, in the back seat next to me, but my car seat cradled me so tightly, I could only see his knees, sticking out from his own booster seat. We sat in silence, together, until my mom opened the driver’s door and left. She locked the truck doors behind her, and I suddenly knew there was nothing that was right. MOM, WAIT. WE’RE IN THE BACKSEAT.
I watched her walk across the parking lot, towards a wall of doors. MOM, WAIT. She walked into the building with all the lights on, and almost immediately was on her way back. She picked up the car phone in the front seat of my dad’s truck and dialed a number. When the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line answered, she said: “Yeah, the room of Ricardo Rivas please.”
The phone continued to ring and ring, and she hung up and did it again. Asking the voice on the phone, again, if she could talk to her own husband.
This went on for eternity. It went on for hours, for days, for years, the rest of my childhood happened in the backseat of this truck while my mother tried to get my father on the phone, and I think I may have almost fallen asleep again when my Dad’s voice answered, and my mother’s voice shouted WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?
I’ve had this memory my whole life. A memory so old, I began to wonder if it actually happened to me. Was this a scene from some nineties movie? Was this something I dreamt on a night that my parents were fighting?
This memory sticks with me, if not for the absolute fear and confusion of my own, but the feelings that emanated from my mother in the cab of that truck. Rage, hurt, betrayal, helplessness, fear of the unknown, and the anger that comes from not understanding.
My mom was in my kitchen yesterday, helping me set the table for lunch, when I finally asked her about this memory I’d been holding onto for over 25 years. I could feel the room tense up with her shoulders, and as I began to say, “I asked Chris a few years ago, but he said he didn’t-“
She turned around to face me, “Yeah, that happened.” She cut me off. “I can’t believe you remember that, you must have been, only… three?”
My eyes widened. “Okay, so? What happened? Where were we? What was going on?”
Something I somehow had forgotten until she said it, was how my mom slept in my bedroom with me, for years. I had a metal frame daybed with a trundle bed that she pulled out from under my bed and across my room and slept in every night. I had developed sleep-dependency issues by the time I was in sixth grade. I used to try to spend the night at my friend’s houses, but then cry and cry throughout the night until I mustered the courage to wake up my friend’s parents, and ask them to call my mom to pick me up.
She told me about a dream she had, while asleep in the trundle bed, across the room from me. In her dream, she says she heard a single voice call out to her: “What do you THINK he’s doing in the garage?” She woke up immediately from this dream, and she says she walked out of the house and into the garage to find my dad in the driver seat of her car. She asked him: WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?
“Adjusting the radio.” He fumbled.
She opened the passenger door and found his meth pipe on the floor.
My mom shared with me, a few stories, from circa whenever-the-fuck their marriage began seriously failing: early 90’s. Which means, not even halfway through their marriage yet. Stories that didn’t really have an ending; just painted a portrait. A portrait of my childhood from the adult’s world. We lived in the same house, but lived wildly different lives.
My mom told me of times she made my Dad leave to stay at a hotel. “I’d take you guys to visit him after he was off work for the day,” she was telling me.
“Visit him?” I asked, “He was staying away from home for more than a night?”
“Weeks.” She replied. My eyes widened. “He’d always pick the hotel off Watt and 80…”
“Hooker central?”
“Yep.” She said.
“I don’t get it. Why did you put up with this for so long?”
She shrugged, “He was my husband.”
Someone asked me recently, “Do you ever plan to get married?”
I shook my head, and curled my face in disgust. “Hell no.”
“Really? Why?”
I shrugged. “My parents were married for 17 years, and they did such a terrible job at it. I guess I’ve never really seen a good example of marriage.”
She thought for a minute. “Me either actually.”
My relationship with my father has always been strained. His relationship with drugs and alcohol took precedence over any type of relationship he had ever tried to foster with me, and then when he got sober- it was his new wife that took precedence.
The harsh reality that I’ve quite literally spent my entire life trying to love those that put me second.
Wild Little Hare 