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Ever watch a family shatter?
Some families separate in slow-motion, members drifting away in ever-widening circles until one day they wake up and they're on separate moons. Other families rip apart in a single violent motion, spraying gore across three generations.
"Shatter" is the word of choice for the blogger who writes Cry It Out: Memoirs of a stay-at-home dad. In A Very Public Experiment: Part 5, Mike Adamick tells the story of how his family shattered:
"A few months before my twelfth Christmas, my brother Jeff hung himself from a tree in our neighborhood creek, my dad went to alcohol rehab never to return, and, one dreary, rain-socked wintry afternoon as the holiday drew closer, I curled up on the family room couch with a notepad and a pen, making a voluminous list of all the presents and toys I desired that year. If I had learned anything in the preceding months, it was that people liked to buy children out of grief. And while I realized that on some level it might be a difficult holiday as our family continued its slow, aching shatter, I knew it would also be a year of bounty."
Bounty indeed. Adamick is from one of those families -- we know who we are -- where the schoolyard chant about love, marriage and a baby carriage are just the beginning lyrics in a song of life that may also include alcohol, suicide, more alcohol, abuse of one kind or another, abandonment, grief and ... heaven help us .. love. Even after all that.
If you have Adamick's superpowers with prose, this family life also comes with the ability to spin humor and tension into the telling of it all:
"I remember the way the cone of light covered the stoop of his aging, cracked stucco apartment, the yellow light tossing down a flickering pyramid upon us. Moths and bugs crisscrossed above our heads and the slow roar of the freeway could be heard in the distance. My mom knocked loudly on the door, while Tom stood rigidly at her side, shivering a bit — from the cold maybe. I stood behind them, peering through legs and arms, trying to get a glimpse into my dad’s apartment. I had never been inside and was curious about how he was spending his days without us..."
You won't like what comes next for 12-year-old Mike. The kicker is how this gifted writer pulls us back through the looking glass into the new world he's created for himself.
Now a man, he has love. A marriage with Dana. A daughter, Emmeline. Still, his waking dreams are -- educated? haunted? whatever -- by knowing what could come next if his first family is any example:
"It was as if I could read these questions on Dana’s face. They needed me and I wasn’t there when I said I would be. What was being fulfilled? What unseen, haunted Oracle had conjured the past into the present?
I took Emme off of Dana’s chest.
“I swear it,” I promised. “You can trust me.”
Without giving anything further away here, Adamick's ability to bridge the many loves in his life -- those lost forever, those earned now every day -- make this blog post one of the most profound and moving we've ever read. And for that, Cry It Out: Memoirs of a stay-at-home dad is our BlogHer of the Week.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to send in your nominated posts. Remember to nominate individual posts, not entire blogs, and keep them coming! If you want to check out all the BlogHer of the Week posts, check out the BlogHer of the Week archive.
Best,
Lisa
For Elisa, Jory and Lisa
BlogHer Co-founders
