The Time I Found the Letters

The too long Holiday visit was over now and I was home. My home. Hours away from the placed I’d grown up. The place I always called home. I’d gone home because it was time. Past time, really. I needed to see all of them. The people who haunted my dreams and made me cry at random times during the day. The reasons for the darkness in the afternoons that stayed with me into the evenings.

I settled into my home — MY HOME. The apartment in the middle of downtown in a city growing rapidly. Not like the one I’d just left, a once-great place that loomed large in my mind as the best place in the world. Now home, that former city seemed quaint, small, insignificant. But, well, not insignificant since everything had happened there.

Laundry was going and my things were back in order and my luggage was back in the closet. I opened the folder I’d pulled from my bag. It was stuffed with the letters. I found them in the bottom of a yellow two-drawer filing cabinet at the back of the closet in my childhood bedroom. Mom had it set up as a sewing room now, but she’d pushed my things to the back of that tiny closet. On the visit, I’d slept in that room on a small air mattress for an entire week.

Each night, as soon as I was confident everyone was asleep, I’d go back in time. Back to the monster that visited after bath time. The one that left marks I was not to show to anyone else. Back to cookies and milk after getting off the school bus. Everything warm and bright and rosy as long as all the schoolwork came back with an “A” and the rooms were perfect and there weren’t any mistakes made. Back to a walk down a sidewalk to a large church. To Boy Scout meetings and to the playground at the school on the weekends. Back to summers walking to the corner grocery store. Back to the screaming from the bathroom or the bedroom or the kitchen late in the evening when the most recent sins of the father had been discovered.

After all these trips back, all the smiles and tears and pain and the new red marks that appeared, I searched the room. Went into the closet. I saw the cabinet, the one where I kept all the papers, the grades, the certificates, the perfect attendance awards. That’s where I found them. Not just my own handwritten journals, but the letters. A 10-pager from my oldest sister. Handwritten and typed letters from Dad. Nothing from my middle brother, now far away and not coming back.

My sister wrote a “Dear Mom & Dad” letter when she was 20 and away at college and apparently left it at home or gave it to Mom or whatever. No idea if Dad ever saw it since he was never home and Mom wasn’t in the habit of showing him things.

She thanked them both for raising her, such as it was. Then took them to task for the screaming, the lies, the pain, the disappearing. Told them all of us deserved better. She was most angry at Dad for failing to be a leader of the family.

Dad wrote his notes on yellow legal pads, mostly. There were a few typed letters expressing his deep regret and desire to once again find the right path. Mostly, he expressed nearly every day his love for all of us. Even Mom. Knowing what he was doing as he wrote those words made it difficult to understand.

How long had Mom had these letters? Why didn’t she share them, especially as we became adults?

My own notes were those of teenage desire, dreams, hopes, and anger. A promise to build something better.

Now, I’m back home. My home. With the letters. Another key to a life I never quite understood.

As the picture of those years becomes more clear, I find myself open to new possibilities. Less likely to stop myself from reaching for every single ounce of what I can be.

I went home this last time in search of answers. I came back with letters and questions.