Page 19 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
“I’ve got a better place than this in mind,” I told Wyatt. “But it’s farther along—about a mile hike down to the beach. Or we can stay here, go sit on that bench over there. We’ll see the sunset from either place.”
“I want the beach!” He was already getting out of the car. Feeling pretty good about myself, I got out and joined him.
Wyatt’s head swiveled in every direction as we walked along the edge of the bluff. I found myself looking in the same directions, seeing things I’d grown up seeing and, again, realizing how much I’d missed of my home world. It made me wonder: had I appreciated all this remarkable beauty as a kid?
I don’t think I had. I think I took it for granted as simply the way the world looked. I think I took a lot of things—good and bad—for granted as simply the way things were. Maybe that’sthe lot of childhood. When we’re young, we don’t realize that other people are living completely different lives in completely different environments. We don’t know that the natural beauty around us is unusual. And some of us don’t understand that other kids have parents who are good to them always, and not only when there are outsiders around to see.
Even when we’re taught in school about different cultures, those are things that happen and people who live in books and educational videos. Maybe even children who are privileged enough to travel widely in their youth see different worlds as if they are Disney World, provided for their vacation amusements.
I don’t know about that. I was never more than fifty miles from Bluster until I left it entirely. All I had known of the world was this corner. Since I’d returned, I was hit again and again by the understanding of how much I’d lost—how much I’d failed to love sufficiently when it was in my life, and how much my memories had been throttled by the things I’d escaped.
I was also realizing that I’d failed my kid. Not because I wasn’t good to him always, anywhere, but because I’d never tried to expand his understanding of the world. This move west was Wyatt’s first in-person exposure to a lot of different environments.
Micah and I had done a little bit of traveling with Wyatt, but not enough. Part of that was not my fault: Micah was terrified of flying (ironic that someone who’d had no qualms about scaling the sides of mountains, sometimes without even a bit of rope to secure him, could not manage to walk down a jetway and step onto a jet, but true nonetheless). So we did outdoorsy road trips and never got more than about two hundred miles from home. But I’d never suggested other kinds of road trips or even a mother-son trip on a plane. Such ideas simply hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been content to follow Micah’s lead.
To be completely honest, my feelings about my relationship with Micah were starting to become even more complicated than his sudden death followed by the financial ruin caused by his bad, and secret, decisions had already caused them to be.
I was beginning to realize that maybe Micah had been as controlling as my mother. He’d simply wrapped it in a vastly more pleasant, gentle, smiling package so that I hadn’t realized how much I’d been manipulated. And it was so much deeper than taking only vacations Micah wanted to take.
I’d thought our finances were combined—joint bank accounts, joint investment accounts, everything but our work-connected accounts together. But that had not been the case. He’d put most of the money I’d thought we were investing jointly into his own accounts—which I hadn’t even known he’d had. And then he’d lost it all.
The house? Not in my name. Sixteen years of marriage, and I wasn’t the owner of the house I’d lived in all that time. I’d known it, I’d mentioned it a few times, he’d said of course, we should certainly do that. But it never happened, and I eventually stopped bringing it up—I stopped even thinking about it. In my head, it became one of those things that clearly wasn’t as important as I thought it was.
So he’d been able to leverage the house straight into the ground while he invested in crazy get-rich-quick schemes and leave his wife and child homeless when he died.
When he died recklessly, climbing a hundred-foot-cliff face without safety gear.
Now I’m an intelligent, educated, adult person. I realize that I should have been involved enough in our finances to at least understand that the things I could see did not square up right. But I think, despite my intelligent, educated adult status, I want to blame my childhood for that. I’d been trained from the cradle to defer, to keep the waters as still as I possibly could. To assumethat there was always a power in any relationship and that the power was never me.
I left my first life to escape that powerlessness, but it took the complete destruction of my second life for me to finally begin to break the patterns of thought that hadmademe powerless.
“Mom?” Wyatt asked, and I snapped out of my head.
He was stopped in the middle of the narrow trail, frowning at me. Sunset was coming on soon; he was suffused by golden light, like a Renaissance painting of a saint.
“Yeah?” I tried to sound like I hadn’t spent the past however many minutes of this hike self-flagellating for being a weak-ass little girl well into my thirties. Some role model I was.
Wyatt wasn’t buying my ruse. “Are you okay? I’ve asked like four questions, and you’re blowing me off.”
“Sorry, bud. Didn’t mean to blow you off. I guess I sort of fell into a brain hole. What’s up?”
“I should ask you that. What hole did you fall into?”
Well, wasn’t that a crossroads. I could give him some bullshit answer, say I was thinking about the work we had to do at the Sea-Mist. Or I could tell him the truth—or at least as much of the truth as I could tell him without shitting on his dead father. Which was the good-mother choice? Bullshit, or hard truth?
“Welp. I was thinking about all the ways I fucked up that got us into so much trouble when Dad died.”
His face took on that far too old, man-of-the-house look, and I wasn’t surprised when he said, “You didn’t mess up, Mom. You did the best you could when everything was terrible.”
I reached out and grabbed his hand. As we continued forward, squeezed side-by-side on the narrow path, I explained, “What I did wrong was let your dad control a lot of important things about our life. Like finances. He made a lot more money than me, he already owned the house, he was a little older, and ...” I stopped, having second thoughts about choosing thehard truth over the bullshit, but I was too far along now to go back. “And I think I didn’t know that I deserved to be part of all that. I think I met him before I’d recovered enough from the way I was raised to know I deserved to have a say. That’s not Dad’s fault, that’s my fault.” I tacked on a stupid, self-deprecating little titter and added, “Anyway, that’s my brain hole tonight.”
We walked along in quiet, hand in hand, for a few minutes. And then my fifteen-year-old son asked me, “Aren’t you still doing it? Like, right now?”
At first, I didn’t see his meaning. “Doing what?”
“Telling yourself you don’t deserve to have a say?” When I gave him the confused look that question deserved, he clarified and just about knocked me backward with his insight. “I guess it’s your job to try to hide the bad stuff Dad did from me—or you think it’s your job, anyway—so I probably don’t know everything, but we lost our home because Dad took out a big loan on it so he could give it to Uncle Chaz for his video-game climbing gym idea, right? And he did all that without talking you about it or even telling you it happened, right?”
That was, in fact, a fuller understanding of things than I’d realized he had, yes. “Right. That’s pretty close to the facts.”
