I never liked the women that my father chased around like a puppy who’d lost his mother. Fat, short, abrasive, somehow saying more about the way he thought about himself. To me, my father was always a rock, stoic, a giving tree whose branches had been nearly hacked away by the axe of my self-indulgent, capricious, drug riddled mother. But once she went away— and I mean really went away. Locked away for so long that she’d be old and grey the next time she saw the light of day and breathed the air of the free. I’d always assumed my father would find someone that shared the same familial values as he. Not that my father was a religious fanatic, but rather he had a keen understanding that when a man becomes a father it’s that man’s responsibility to put his family first. Whether it was taking me to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve to open presents and eat cookies in the comfort of her love or holding my hand whenever I was sick and never leaving my side no matter how deep into the twilight we drifted. Perhaps that’s where his image of women came from, his mother. My grandmother, a woman who would wake up at 2am to get ice cream from the freezer and of course, offer me a bowl. A woman who sounded like a grizzly as she rumbled down the hallway towards her favorite closet— the fridge. Who’s that famous guy who said that all men only want to marry their mothers? I don’t know, but I think he may’ve been on to something.
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