I dropped my duffle bag on the floor and took a seat on the couch opposite my father’s favorite chair. “I didn’t know that. How’s she doing?”
“Eh. You know your aunt Gloria… She makes a federal case out of everything and loves the attention. But the doctor says she’s healing just fine.”
That sounded about right. Aunt Gloria did love having people fuss over her. “How about Mom? How’s she doing?”
“Good, good. Got some arthritis starting up lately. But that’s normal at our age.”
I nodded. “How about her…mental health?”
My father’s brows dipped down like he had no idea what I was talking about. “Your mother’s fine.”
Dad liked to pretend there was nothing wrong, so Mom’s condition wasn’t something we talked about with him—especially not me, since I was the youngest. It had been my sisters who first explained things to me when I was eight or nine and started to realize other moms didn’t spend two months in bed, followed by three months of singing, crafting, cooking, and incessant housecleaning at all hours of the night.
I raked a hand through my hair. “I know we don’t talk about it, but I worry about Mom’s mental health.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Yeah, I do, Dad.”
He leveled me with a warning look. “No, you don’t.”
I sighed. My dad was a good dad—a great dad, even. When I was a kid he would come home after working a sixteen-hour day and still throw a ball around with me in the yard. He showed up to every baseball, hockey, and swim-team event, and never even missed a painful recorder concert. He made sure we had dinner on the table every night, even if Mom was in bed, and he quietly picked up all the slack during her dark times.
But what he didn’t do was talk about it. And to this day, I wasn’t sure who he was trying to protect—my mother or me and my sisters.
“Dad… Can we talk about it for a minute?”
My father stood. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m going to make us some tea.”
I followed him into the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, I watched as he busied himself filling the pot and getting the mugs ready with tea bags. If I didn’t push, this conversation wasn’t going to happen. In fact, it might not happen even if I did push. Yet I needed to try. It was long overdue.
“Did you know how Mom was before you got married?”
“I’m not talking about this.”
“But I need you to.”
“No. You don’t.” The kettle started to whistle, so he lifted it and poured the water into the mugs. After he steeped the tea, he put sugar on the table and took a seat.
“Dad...”
He let out a loud sigh. “What difference does any of this make to you? Your life is what it was regardless of what I knew and didn’t know, and I think we gave you a pretty damn good childhood regardless.”
“You did. Absolutely. I had a great childhood.”
“Then why do you need to poke around? None of it will change anything. Let sleeping dogs lie, son.”
I took the seat across from him and waited until he looked up and gave me his full attention. Then I took a deep breath. “I…I sometimes worry that my depression might progress into something more, or maybe I haven’t developed all the symptoms I’m going to have yet. Bipolar is hereditary. I know you know that.”
My father closed his eyes. “Shit.” He took a minute and then nodded. “Are things getting worse for you?”
“Nothing I can’t handle. I still struggle with some lows at times, but my doctor has been great, and once he adjusts my medicine, I’m able to snap out of it. I don’t spend months down followed by months of manic highs or anything…yet.”
“How’s your sleeping?”
“It’s good. No trouble there.”
My dad stared down into his mug. Eventually, he sighed. “Your mother and I got married very young. I was twenty-one, and she was twenty. She’d always had a lot of energy at times, where she wouldn’t require more than a few hours of sleep, but then there would come a point where she would crash.”
“So you knew about her bipolar disorder before you got married?”
My father frowned. “No. I knew she was different. But I didn’t know the extent of things. It took about five years before it progressed to the level that we couldn’t chalk it up to mood swings anymore.”
I’d done enough reading on the subject to know the average age of onset was twenty-five, so it seemed my mother fit right into the norm.
“Would it have…changed things if you knew?”
My father’s forehead creased. “What are you asking me?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dad.”
My father stared at me for a while. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Living with someone with bipolar disorder can be very difficult. But there’s never been a single day I regretted asking your mother to be my wife.”