I remember it all, vividly. I stood in the living room, my younger brother at my side. My dad stood behind us, his hands gripping our small shoulders. We starred, stricken at my mom who faced us from across the room.
I remember it all. Her freshly washed hair dripped on her neck along with the tears that peppered her cheeks. She wore a long teal skirt decorated with large flowers. My parents were supposed to go out to dinner that night, a celebration during the holiday season. The heels of her boots clicked as she paced, cutting through the silence. Then the sobs erupted, desperate and gasping, as the phone dropped to the ground and my mother fell to her knees.
I remember it all. We watched glass shatter. Split into a thousand tiny pieces, they ricocheted off the ground, lodging themselves in the very fabric of our lives. Trying to salvage what was left of the irreparable fragments, we found ourselves without any glue, nothing to keep the damage from spreading. Even after we had carefully picked out the shards imbedded in our skin the phantom pain still lingered and the glass broke all over again. And we hadn’t even started to help her yet.
I remember it all but I don’t remember her. Wrapped in her grief, shrouded in it, she slipped away from us. There was not enough of her left to make an impression on my young brain. I remember rides to school, lunches ready-made, but not her— never her. We kept her busy, my dad says, we were the only thing getting her up each morning. But sometimes getting up isn’t enough: she says she doesn’t remember four-year-old me either. Death, death took her away from me and for that he will not be forgiven.
Now, years later, my mom is vibrant again. Not as she once was I think, although I don’t remember far back enough to know for sure. She asked me once if I felt it was my job to protect her— hide my own cracks and chips because she had already carried enough. I said yes; how could it not be? How could I have seen her so broken and not want desperately, fatally to stitch her fissures, repair her ruptures.
And so I became her glassmaker. I hid and concealed and protected; I welded and glued and tapped. I took pride in it, I saved her from the ugliness inside me. I had watched her break; I would never subject her to the same fate. But the problem with being the glass maker is when you crack— as we all inevitably do— who will be there to put you back together?