An excerpt from my memoir, Tulip

As soon as I entered the dimly lit kitchen the morning after “It” had happened again in fourth grade, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I remembered our predicament.  Mom was missing again. The days leading up to it had been a blur of chaos, most of which left me hiding in my room under the covers drawing myself within a cocoon of safety.

Dad didn’t hear me enter the room. He was standing at the kitchen counter with his back to me, methodically making sandwiches for our school lunches.  He lacked the ease of routine that Mom possessed. His orchestrated movements – the bread here, the meat there – it wasn’t natural. This couldn’t be real life.  In real life, Mom ironed his shirt and pants in the morning.  He slung a tie around his neck, slipped into his shiny shoes, grumbled a goodbye, and was off to work. This dad, in his undershirt and dress pants slapping together school sandwiches, was not the dad I knew.

When he sensed my presence, he turned around slowly, defeatedly, his shoulders hunched, which seemed to have become his new posture.

“Morning, Fluff,” a false sense of confidence punching through the thin veil of his bravado.  “Morning Daddy,” I countered with my equally false greeting. 

I wanted Mom in the kitchen, even if it meant it was the black, marble-eyed, crazy version of my mother. I wanted her there to make me feel normal again. I wanted Dad to be on his way to work smoking cigarettes and, listening to AM talk radio. I didn’t want him struggling through school sandwiches with a thick slice of sadness. 

“I put butter on your sandwiches. I don’t know what Mom puts on the sandwiches, but I like butter, so there’s butter on the sandwiches,” he said talking softly and swiftly, more to himself than to me. 

He wore stress like a welder’s mask covering the emotion beneath, protecting both of us from the blazing, palatable pain in the room.

“It’s ok, Daddy, I like butter on my sandwiches,” I lied. 

I had never had butter on my sandwiches.  Mom always made my salami and mustard or ham and mustard sandwiches sans butter, but I was willing to try butter in this instance if it meant Dad’s droopy eyes would go back to normal.

Somehow, Dad got all five of us off to school with lunches in-hand, our names neatly written in his all caps printed writing on the paper bags. He wasn’t aware that Mom usually only put our first initial on the bags, but he seemed to take pride in writing out our full names.  As I reached up to grab my bag off of the countertop, I felt the weight of this small morning task he had performed.  With a butter knife and some paper bags, he taught me what perseverance looked like. 

I took my cue from him even though my insides felt like jiggly, shaky jelly, I grabbed my bag and walked out of the door with my brothers to school.  I found that place inside where you only see the few, small steps in front of you, not the big scary monster behind you, or the unknown, overgrown path in front. When I bit into my sandwich at lunchtime, I realized for the first time that butter tastes just as good on a salami sandwich as mustard. It wasn’t the same as mustard, but it was a sandwich and it was good and my dad had made it in his undershirt and dress pants before he left for work.