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BUT WHAT OF the father, the man who is all men? That’s what therapists want to know; it’s what Dr. Allison will ask me. The night my husband left us – the “us” being our boy Carlos, Jr. and Yours Truly – my son had gone to a sleepover earlier and I was alone and crazy. Carlos, Jr. and I had no tip-off that the family was about to lose a piece of itself. Minutes after that good-bye I’d walked out of our two bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago, rushed across North LaSalle and got slammed by a taxi. Both my right hip and my collarbone had multiple fractures. The ER doctor said I was very lucky but I didn’t feel lucky. It took months to heal, the physical therapy, the pain, you don’t know. And though I would not start with Dr. Allison for another six months, I shouldn’t have to tell you how therapists love connecting a husband leaving his wife and his son to the wife stepping in front of a moving taxi.
But what of the father, the man who is all men? Yes, well. In three or four days the movers came to gather my husband’s things. Our apartment looked unbelievably empty, devastatingly empty. About that time I began to obsess about my father, a man who’d also left his family. I had been very young then. And a statistic, I was one of five million kids being raised by a single parent, my mother. In another ten years I’d be one of fifteen million. And so on and so on. After my husband left, I began thinking about my father, |
