fatherhood
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I remember the birth because it was winter. I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine. I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must be what peace was. They said she was small, fragile. He called her perfect. I told myself I’d given him a gift. I said it
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The story written is not the only story that could be told. The same circumstances – the same childhood, the same betrayal, the same courtroom silence – can be narrated as the making of a monster or the tempering of a saint. Events are fixed; meaning is not. This is what Jung understood when he
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There was a time when the phrase “a good man” carried moral weight. It did not mean a harmless man, nor a man subdued by guilt or fashion, but a man who had learned to master his own capacity for destruction. A good man was dangerous, disciplined, and devoted. He could protect without posturing, and
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I call them the good years. I have always called them that. Beaming as though your brightness were my achievement. Perhaps it was. I left too many silences in my wake, so you filled them with pride on my behalf. It was easier that way. D had remarried. She hated me, her eyes narrowed whenever
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I didn’t expect him to say thank you. But I thought he might see what I was trying to do. I arrived early. Always do. Old habit from court. Always be early, always observe the room before you’re observed. The café was sterile, unmodern, one of those places that pretends to be warm but smells
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There is a silence that precedes distortion…an eerie stillness, not unlike the hush before the hunter’s arrow finds its mark. In cases of psychological alienation, especially those born from maternal betrayal, the silence is never benign. It is structured. Operative. A veil drawn across the soul’s eyes. It is in that silence that memory begins
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He didn’t remember being sent away.He remembered the not-coming-back. The trunk shut. The room went quiet. A boy became a border. At age six, a child cannot conceptualise abandonment. Not yet. What they feel instead is dislocation—a wordless confusion about where home ends and why love must sometimes be scheduled. He was a weekly boarder.
Reade Saunders 