As a parent, constant worrying about your children was part of the job description; were they happy, doing okay in school, did they have friends and on and on. But knowing that something was wrong, really wrong, in their lives created a new sort of worry. It made working and sleeping difficult and it made thinking about other people's problems almost impossible.
And then, the revelations about my sister, sweet Wendy, and the uncorking of that particular bottle of repressed feelings made the simple acts of living and thinking absolutely and utterly painful. Since a therapist who was completely consumed by his own painful past and worrisome present wasn't a very good one, I decided to cut my days short. Annoying, all-seeing Mary's appointments were the first to be cancelled. I wasn't proud of that decision, but in the end I felt I had to. She'd already caused too much of a disruption in my everyday life, and I needed normality, stability, calm... and... world peace!
The twins were both of them bored out of their minds after a week at home, and I reluctantly let them go back to school after a long monologue with quickly spoken words from Zelena's side. She'd apparently rather have every single class with Ms Roberts than stay at home one more day. And Alanna had nodded and told me that if they didn't go back to school Zelena would probably start disassembling the furniture using kitchen knives and forks, and for my information, she would have done it already if she'd managed to find any tools.
So, I let them go back to school and nervously watched them in the afternoons and evenings to see if they were okay. According to Alanna my attempts to learn if something was wrong and my questions about school was borderline obsessive. Zelena just looked at me, smiled a crooked smile and said "daaad" most of the time.
I didn't like their pale silence and too serious expressions, so different from their usual quirky cheekiness and at the end of their first week back in school I waited for them to get home, anxious to see if they were ok. I had decided I wouldn't let them go back again, I just wouldn't. If I had to worry about them one more day I would die standing by the door, waiting for them to come home, more stressed out than on those previously too long mornings.
I wasn't prepared to greet the two happy girls who came tumbling in through the door and I stared at them, mouth probably wide open. I blinked and stared, stared and blinked, and saw my daughters fall to the floor, laughing at their poor soon gray-haired father. I was lost for words. What could have possibly created that change in them?
A few minutes of giggling later, Alanna sat up and wiped her eyes.
"You looked just like Ms Roberts did about half an hour before lunch!" she said still gasping for air "When the headmaster came to get her in the middle of our science class. You both looked like some sort of owl and frog combination..."
"I'm still sorry I missed that," Zelena said with a frown "she looked more like a deer when she passed me on her way to the headmaster's office..."
"Not as much as that shell-shocked assistant who had to step in after the headmaster came back and told us that Ms Roberts wasn't coming back" Alanna said with a sigh.
"What, wait, how?" I said "Where were you then, Zed? And she's not coming back, Al? Details, please?"
"They didn't give us any details," Alanna said "but they were going to contact all parents as soon as possible."
"And, are you both okay?" I asked, thoughts whirling.
"Just as long as they find us a good science teacher this time around, I'll be fine." Zelena said.
Alanna nodded and I hugged them close and kissed the tops of their heads. My darling girls, safe from harm, or at least as safe as my worried papa heart would ever consider them to be. I wondered what had made the headmaster and school board reconsider? Perhaps my desperate attempts at getting the school to listen had been successful after all?
The phone call from school came the day after but the information I was given was frustratingly non-informative. Ms Roberts had to be let go because her and the school's opinions about teaching were too far apart, and a couple of other sentences that really didn't say anything at all. I tried to get a straight answer to my question if her treatment of my girls was the reason they decided to get rid of her, but I only got a repetition of the official reasons once more.
Weeks passed and the girls grew happier and I grew much less worried. I still kept my eyes and ears open and I suspected that my overprotective ways would continue for some time, to the annoyance of my kids.
I thought about Mary, what she had told me about herself and what she had said about my sister more often than I would like to admit. When the acute pain of remembering had passed and I'd been able to process my memories and feelings some, I realized I'd been unfair to cancel her appointments. But I couldn't stand the thought of seeing her just yet, there was something about her that pulled me apart and put me back together again all in a jumble, with some pieces missing. I had picked up the phone a couple of times to call her and tell her I was sorry for not being able to keep my promise, but I only ended up with the phone in my hand staring unseeingly in front of me, with images of my sister swimming in the tears that collected in my eyes.
My father and sister had never agreed on anything. Where one thought religion was the answer to everything the other one believed it was what caused all the bad things in the modern world. Where one person accepted only two types of love, the heterosexual love of married couples and the love of and for God, the other person stated that all forms of love must be respected and cherished.
The discussions and arguments were plenty until that final day where Wendy told father that she loved girls and as a result got excluded from the family. I had always thought she'd really just said it to provoke, not because she actually was a homosexual, but after Mary's words I had to face the fact that it was true. It really didn't bother me as much as the niggling thought that Mary probably was a girl-loving-girl too.
The fact that I still had thoughts about Mary, niggling or not, bothered me even more. I kept seeing her in my mind, the way she had looked when she stood by the window with sunshine caressing her hair, her eyes wide and sad. Her colors had been so strong, so vivid and her song had been so full of love and sorrow. In that moment I had seen, heard and felt her in a way I had never seen, heard or felt anyone before. Right there and then she'd seemed like an angel, and I had wanted to reach out and touch her. I had wanted to tell her she didn't need to be sad, that she wasn't alone anymore...
My strangely upsetting thoughts about Mary was interrupted by the creaking sound of a floorboard in the hallway outside my room and then a tousled-haired Zelena walked in.
"Hey," I said "why aren't you sleeping?"
"I woke up from a dream with a question that needed answering." Zelena answered with a yawn.
I was used to the almost too grown-up way my daughter had of speaking, and I had to constantly remind myself that she wasn't even a teenager yet. She threw herself down beside me where I was sitting on my bed with an unread book in my hands.
"Is our mother alive," she bluntly asked "and if so, why haven't we met her?"
I had been dreading the day they'd start asking about their mother for years, and I was frankly surprised it hadn't been sooner. I had decided to tell them everything when I thought it was time for them to know, constantly pushing that time to the future, at a much later date.
"I suppose I should tell you about your mother, but Alanna should be told at the same time, don't you think?" I answered hoping for a few more hours.
"S'ok... I'm coming," a tired and grumpy voice from the hallway signaled Alanna's arrival.
She walked in with sleepy eyes, her hair in simple braids, preventing the tousled look of her sister's, and threw herself down on her stomach on the foot of the bed. Zelena threw her a pillow and she settled in on her side looking at me with her wide blue eyes, so similar to my own.
"First of all, there are several reasons why I haven't told you about your mother, but the main one is that the story is a pretty sad one, and it might make you upset, okay?" I said whilst trying to organize my thoughts and words, hoping that I could tell them the story without hurting them.
"Just get on with it," Alanna grumbled "need to sleep."
I smiled at her and nodded slowly, still sorting the facts from my feelings.
"Your mother, Helen, and I got married when we were pretty young, I was nineteen and she was eighteen." I started "We met in church where both of our families gathered every Sunday and I liked her quiet beauty and her calm ways."
"So she was just like me then...?" Zelena said with a laugh.
"Just let him finish so we can go to sleep..." Alanna grumbled.
"After we got married we moved into a small house that her parents gave us, right next to their own house, a really stupid idea but since money was short, we were both still in school after all, we complied with her mother's wish to 'keep us close'..." I continued.
"Keeping us close really meant keeping a close watch, keeping us company and keeping us occupied with her thoughts about how we should run our household." I said hearing the bitter tone in my voice "There's a lesson there if you care to listen? Never live close to any of your parents, it'll never go well, trust me!"
Since there were no interruptions from either of them I kept going.
"Of course Helen was the one who was told off for doing things wrong more often than me, but it seemed she took it all pretty well, she was always the same calm woman that I'd married, always perfectly put together, never a hair out of place..."
I stopped to draw a breath and let go of the old frustrated anger I always felt when I thought about those days.
