Loss of Gravity: The Pieces She Left Behind, Part 1 of 5.

My mother was a planet, and my father simply orbited her. Weather systems, shifting tides, blue-bird days, wind that shook foundations, my father wore her moods like a cloak around his shoulders. He adored her, he needed her, he lived for her. When my mother finally succumbed to her three year battle with cancer, the loss of her gravity spun my father out into a world he was never prepared to handle on his own.

Suddenly there was a checkbook to balance, a yard to tend, a house to clean, all the while trying to find his footing at the bottom of a hole he hadn’t known grief could dig. And somehow, impossibly, the grass still needed watering.

There’s a price to pay, whether you’re the planet or the one caught in its orbit, whether your gravity gathers souls or you spend your life being pulled along. My parents both paid that price. Understanding that cost has taken me decades to unwrap. But there is one moment I return to, one whose importance I only now understand.

My father handed me a slip of paper with a name and a phone number.

“Your brother called,” he said.

A brother I had never heard of before.

I must confess, it took me a moment to understand. The paper in my hand was so small, just a sticky note that had been kept by the phone with my father’s barely legible script. It weighed less than the air I had locked inside my chest but it carried the weight to change my entire understanding of my mother, my father and open a door to a past I had never imagined.

And then I looked at my father’s face.

I wasn’t the only one who had stopped breathing.

Whatever this was, whatever waited on the other end of that phone number, my father hadn’t known about it either.

My mother comes to me often, something I have carried with me for decades.  Christmas with tables of fudge, cookies and a fruitcake that seemed to survive well into Valentine’s Day, until someone - most likely my father - relieved us of the misery of having to eat it. The smell of a pot of beans with ham simmering on the stove. My mother yelling from upstairs to remind me there was fresh milk in the fridge. The house that she kept meticulously clean, all the while cigarette smoke quietly laid claim to every surface.

It’s only decades later that I have begun to understand my mother. When I was young, her militant command of our lives often felt harsh. I still remember, waking up on a Saturday morning to the hissing sound of Lysol as my mother fumigated my room, even the bed I was trying to disappear into was covered in its haze. There were rules to follow, expectations to meet, a household kept firmly within boundaries she had drawn. I knew my mother then, but it has taken me most of my life to know the woman.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have caught myself behaving like my mother. To this day I struggle to sit and watch an entire movie, constantly shuffling from the couch to throw laundry in the washer, refill the dog’s water bowl, back to the couch until I remember I need to prep food for the week then up again.

The way I wring my hands when I’m thinking. My intolerance of inefficiency. The absolute certainty that my way is the only way.

Yes. These are all my mother. I have become the thing I swore I never would.

The rules. The routines. The insistence that things be done correctly - and by correctly, I mean her way. It has taken me decades to understand that control can sometimes be mistaken for strength.

My mother was drowning.

She controlled what she could because underneath it all lay a past that had stolen her future. And it was the look on my father’s face as he handed me the note - the one bearing the name of a brother we had never heard of - that finally showed me just how hard my mother had been fighting to keep her head above the water.

What would one expect from their father in a moment like this? His eyes moved from the note in my hand to my face, then back again, almost as if he expected me to provide an explanation.

This could have been the moment that my father finally let go. The moment he opened the door to a past my mother had kept firmly closed. He could have been angry. He could have demanded answers. He could have told me everything he knew.

Instead, my father did what my father had always done. He protected my mother.

When I finally dialed the number, my thumb had brushed across the note so many times that my father’s barely legible handwriting had begun to fade.

What waited on the other end was a past my mother had spent a lifetime keeping beneath the surface.

I hadn’t found one brother my mother had left behind. I had found four.

Next week in Part 2, I dial the number.