There are some memories I hold on to so clearly.
And they sit in such stark difference.
My mother, when I was 9, kneeled before me in the den, tears in her eyes, told me she was trying to make the marriage work for us kids, but she couldn’t do it much longer. She was going to divorce my dad.
I told her “it’s going to be ok mommy”, and I hugged her.
She waited 2 years to file. I kept it from my father.
When I was 12, and my mother had left and my father’s dad had just died, and he sat eye to eye with me on the couch, and it was one of the few times I ever saw my father cry. He told me, sobbing, I’m so sorry Kelsey, your mother left us, I love your mother, I wanted her to stay, I tried.
I did not tell my father what my mother had said a few years earlier. I did not hold him.
I still carry that. He’s gone. I’m so, so, so, so sorry Dad. There is never enough time.
Laughs and Lobotomies 