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“Is dad… is dad okay?” I asked, with tears filling my own eyes, my mind running wild.
She immediately broke down, uncontrollably bawling. Her body shaking and shuddering so hard, I rushed to her side, bending down and closing her in with my arms, holding on for dear life. She shook even harder. I found it hard to breathe from the force of her crying. I would never forget what it felt like to try to hold my mother together while she fell apart in my arms.
“Shhh… it’s okay, Mom. Feel me… follow my voice. It’s going to be okay,” I reassured her with the same soothing tone Dylan had used on me the day I told him the truth. Gently, I stroked her hair, rocking us back and forth, desperately wanting to give her any comfort that I could.
“No! It’s not, Aubrey, it’s never going to be okay! I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that I ruined everything! It’s all my fault!” she wallowed against me.
“It’s fine, Mom, just try to calm down please.” I begged and pleaded with her.
“I can’t! Please forgive me! I’m begging you to please forgive me!”
“Of course I will,” I replied with tears falling down my face. I couldn’t hold them in any longer. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me. Please tell me what’s going on?”
“I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could go back in time and make it all better but I can’t. I will never be able to. He left me and he’s never coming back. There’s nothing I can do about it anymore.”
“Dad? Mom he left—”
“I held him back, Aubrey! He wanted to do so much with his life and I just held him back to fulfill my dreams and to do what I wanted. I never let him have a choice. Not once. It was always about me. I was selfish, Aubrey. I loved him so much and he sacrificed everything for me. I could see it in his eyes. He wanted more out of life, out of what I could give him, but I didn’t care. I made him choose me!” she uncontrollably wept.
“We were so fucking young. I didn’t know any better. I thought our love could make it through anything, but I was wrong. He gave up everything for me, but he said he wanted to. He made me believe he did. I should have known. I just never thought it would ever get to this point.”
“Mom, I—”
“He resented me, Aubrey. When I realized it, I tried to make it better. Why do you think he went back to school? I thought if he did something he loved, it would fix things, but it only became worse. Our dynamic changed. I wasn’t the provider anymore and I didn’t know how to share that with him. I felt like in his eyes I wasn’t doing a good job, like I failed at that too. It was just too much to handle. All we did was fight all the time. I didn’t know how to make it better, I didn’t know how to be a wife or a mother, I didn’t know anything anymore.”
I pulled away from her, needing to look into her eyes. She looked so broken, so alone, even though I was right there with her.
“Mom, you didn’t do—”
They say that everything happens for a reason. That your life could change in an instance, in one moment in time and you never even see it coming. There was no preparing for it. No battle to be won. I thought this was my moment.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I did, Aubrey. I failed at everything. I’m still failing. I was at the hospital working my shift and I got served with papers today. Your father wants a divorce. It’s over.”
That night changed everything for me.
There was no going back.
Only moving forward.
I held my mom in my arms until she passed out from the exhaustion of her tears. I stayed there all night with her mourning the cost of her mistakes. I finally put her to bed when the sun came up. I never told Dylan that my father wanted a divorce. My mom and I never discussed that night again either. There was no point, the damage was done.
For both of our lives.
Summer went flying by. I blinked and we were almost through Dylan’s senior year of high school, my junior year. He had applied to several colleges all around the states and got accepted to most of them. He asked me my opinion on every last one, what I thought, what I wanted, where he should go, what was best for us. It was constant, over and over again. Every month became every week and soon it was a daily question. Each time he asked me my heart broke a little more, screaming at me to tell him what I needed.
The truth.
Except I never did.
I never could.
I smiled and told him that he had to choose for himself, that I couldn’t make the decision for him. Which only led to us arguing, a lot. We fought more than we should about the little things because we couldn’t fight about the big things. I couldn’t confront the elephant in the room.
That he was leaving me.
Like my dad did to my mom.
