Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful by Stephanie Wittels Wachs

Author:Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

Things turned out okay for me, Harris. Maybe if you’d had a uterus and got pregnant at fifteen, you’d have also learned that actions have consequences and ultimately not stuck needles into your arms.

• • •

Dad wears the same face now that he wore back then: expressionless but radiating sadness. When I was a little girl, I would wait and wait at the back door for him to come home from work, and when the knob turned, it was the happiest moment of my day. Where is that man? Is he still in there somewhere or gone forever?

I want to snap him out of it somehow, to say the thing that will make him realize it’s not his fault, that he didn’t make his teen daughter pregnant or his grown son OD. I want to take his hand, walk him out to the car, put him in the passenger seat, drive him to a really good therapist, and sit there with him until his mind is fixed. I want to fly him out to a sweat lodge in the middle of the desert where a shaman can lead him through an intense guided meditation that will exorcize the demons and make him realize he deserves to keep on living.

Instead, I ask if we can talk. He sort of sighs, turns off Fox News, and says, “Okay, let’s talk.” I miss our collective political war with Dad. He always loved to egg us on and spar with his “liberal, commie” offspring. I sometimes think he’s actually a secret liberal who had a master plan all along to make his children liberal by pretending he believed the opposite. Now Mike and I are left to carry the commie torch, and it’s not as fun without you.

Dad avoids eye contact and talks softly, almost in a growl. It’s hard to know where to start. There’s so much to say.

“Dad, I’m worried about you. How are you not talking about this? I don’t understand.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Um, how devastated and sad you are?”

“I already know that. What do I want to talk to somebody about that for?”

“So you can stop blaming yourself?”

“Eh, it doesn’t happen that way.”

“So, what, you feel like you didn’t do enough to prevent it?”

“We should have had a better relationship.”

“Like from the beginning?”

“Yeah, from the beginning.” He pauses and reaches into his memory. “I was always too busy—working all the time. I remember we went on this camping trip one time. He’d come home from Camp Blue Star one summer, and they’d gone camping while he was there, and he was excited about it. So we decided we’d go camping together one weekend, and we went and swam a little bit and ate but wound up coming home early the next morning.” His voice trails off. “It just didn’t turn out to be fun like he thought it was gonna be.”

“Dad, I don’t think that’s true. Your perception is off. We went on vacations. You did Little League. You did Pinewood Derby.

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