Love Broken and Mended

Estrangement is as much an opportunity as it is an obstacle. The concept of family is such a complicated notion. The limiting idea of what a traditional family looks like has shaped our anxieties, woes and goals. Harmony within the family unit is predicated on the way we communicate love through honesty, acceptance and trust. These things are fragile. The intricacy of the self, with all its evolving idiosyncrasies and baseline conceptualization of the self, is always standing near the precipice of coming undone. All it takes is one wrong move, and the self can unravel. This can have a ripple effect on everyone around us. As we change, so does our environment. This has been the source of so many tales that fall outside of the traditional family.

This is the tale of one family which lost something important and replaced it with something else. Something just as consequential, but of a completely different nature. Something shockingly atypical to say the least.

Changes

Isadora was just a child when her sense of family fell apart. Her family splintered, her parent's divorce forcing a rift between mother, father, and daughter. She was only 10 when her world came crashing down around her. Her father couldn't or wouldn't explain himself. Her mother couldn't or wouldn't help herself from sharing her opinion. For so long, she knew next to nothing about what really happened between them, save for the horrible things her mother would tell her.

The echoes of her mother's voice ring in her mind to this day, to some extent. Some traumas are impossible to completely overcome, no matter how much healing is done. The things she told Isadora about him changed the way she saw her father, and the role of a father within a family. That's not an unusual tale, however far from the idea of a traditional family it may be. Too many of us have been raised in loveless families and, whether this eventually turned into divorce or not, the bitterness felt throughout affects us differently. For Isadora, her mistrust of men was instilled by her mother's callous comments about her father.

"He's a loser. He didn't really love us. He's not a real man. He cheated and left us for some homewrecking bitch. We're better off without him, or any man." The woman would say.

Cold and unsympathetic, her mother's voice would say things which may have been true or not. But unfortunately, Isadora had no way of knowing. Her father was now absent from her life, made unwelcome by her mother's arbitration of what he could or could not have. To her mother, Isadora was no longer a child which she shared responsibility for. She was a piece on the board she could use to hurt her father. Isadora never thought of things in this way, though. Her mother was the only thing resembling stability in her life, after the divorce. She had no way of remedying this, being as young as she was. She couldn't reach out to her father, and he seemingly made no attempts to reach out to her after leaving the family. Or so she thought, for years and years.

When Isadora became a woman, and began scrutinizing her mother's character, she finally saw the woman for what she was. The shock was enough to alienate Isadora from the concept of family itself. Where she once saw family as dependent on resilience, if not on love, she now saw family as a made-up idea forced onto her by a mother that didn't really want her around. She'd done everything short of giving Isadora up for adoption, after all. The emotional and physical abuse had left scars on the young woman which she did not fully heal from. But the scars certainly hardened and made her adverse from affection and intimacy.

When she was just 22, only a few years from her liberation from her mother's grasp, she found herself alone. Truly alone. The prospect of reconnecting with her someday was robbed from Isadora by her mother's sudden death. An aneurysm, they said. As senseless and unexpected as the divorce had been when she was a young girl. Now, Isadora was the bitter, cold, vindictive one, as if her mother's spirit had taken over hers after death. Isadora lost the few friends she had made over her teens, not due to anything they had done but by Isadora's own brand of detachment. She simply went silent, her cynicism dictating her actions. She wouldn't reach out anymore, she wouldn't welcome their attempts to be close to her in her time of need. She even refused to see it as a time of need. She ignored her feelings of loss and grief by colouring her life as a series of abusive lies.

She felt alone even before her mother's passing, but now that feeling changed to an aesthetic truth. She carried herself like a lone wolf. She behaved as if there was nothing to love but herself and even then, her "self" extended only to her career as a bioengineer for a pharmaceutical company and her body sculpted by rigorous exercise. She was a workhorse in the office and at the gym. But her mind and heart were left to harden into a impregnable fortress. Even she couldn't undo the walls she had put up. Introspection was not something she allowed herself to do, mostly out of fear. Her subconscious told her that the walls were more fragile than her ego believed.

Everything about love felt faked by ulterior motives. This felling is what she had gained from the divorce. Everything about men felt dangerously tempting and something to be avoided. This, she gained from her mother. Isadora was the daughter of a bitter, vindictive woman and a cowardly, emotionally stunted father. Or so she thought... she was only half right.

Revelations

This remained true for three torturous years until, on her 25th birthday, she was surprised by a letter in the mail. She saw her name typed up on a custom envelope.

"The Offices of Marten & Gallagher, LLP." It presented.

The stationery made it evident that the firm was small and located in some town she'd never heard of. Worlds away from her big city abode. Isadora was hardly a simple woman, certainly not the small-town girl type. She was a woman working in the S.T.E.M. field. That alone was a hefty layer of distinction. She was self-made, having worked her way through school since she left home at 18. She had nearly paid off her student debt. These were not characteristics one would be likely to find in a small town. She didn't exactly have any friends, let alone someone fitting the profile. There was no reason she should be receiving a letter such as this, from a place such as that. Her confusion only grew when she saw the subject of the letter: "Summons to reading of last will and testament of..."

Of whom? She'd already seen to her mother's affairs. The egomaniacal woman likely thought herself immortal, for she had never even drawn up a personal will, let alone sent it in to a lawyer. Isadora was left with nothing but bad memories. But as she read the name, her fragile walls came tumbling down. Her father had passed.

It took Isadora three days to even look at the letter again. The first day she spent in self-isolation. Take-out, movies and only leaving the bed to go to the bathroom.

She'd called into work and felt a pang of guilt when she said why she was taking the day off. They told her they would write it down as "bereavement". She didn't know that she was bereaved. She knew that the surprising news were weighing heavy on her, but grief wasn't necessarily what she felt.

The second day, she made an emergency call to her therapist, who advised her to read the letter and consider its contents, even if she didn't immediately consider taking any action. After all, her father's last will and testament would likely involve his last message to her, and it was for her to decide whether she wanted to expose herself to this.

The third day, she finally looked through the letter and decided to immediately contact the law firm. She booked a flight and by the end of the week, she found herself in Vancouver, renting a car to travel several hours North, to a town likely never mentioned by anyone in anything other than a national census.

Understanding

The days she spent in that corner of nowhere were some of the most unpleasant of her whole life. Not only was the town far below her standards of living, she also had to deal with the complicated subject of her late father's wishes. The things which came to light put her into a state of shock.

A whole other family... a whole other life after the one he'd shared with Isadora and her mother.

She simply went through the motions. Found out that he and his second wife had died in a car crash, leaving two twin boys behind. They were only 5 years old, too young to process but old enough to understand. Seeing as her father had no family, and the woman he'd left them for was also an orphan and only child (much like Isadora) the kids had no one else... save for her. What the kids did have, was a hefty inheritance, split three ways. She received her third, totalling just shy of a full million. It would seem her father had found success on top of a second lease on life.

Perhaps her portion of the inheritance was bequeathed out of guilt. Either way, she felt every fiber of her being refusing to accept it. She told the lawyers as much. They asked that she take the time to reconsider before giving them a final answer on the matter. They had been very courteous and understanding, especially when she'd refused to hear his last words to her. They'd put his letter to her in an envelope and handed it over just in case she changed her mind someday.

Isadora spent about a week there, considering the implications of what had happened. She went to the local dive bar, feeling the weight of recognition from the small-town folk. After all, the sudden, tragic death of someone in such a tightly knit community was not something easily forgotten, especially so soon. Seeing a young woman, looking so out of place dressed so professionally and seeming so sullen, didn't take a genius to put two and two together. "Four" equaled: she was the daughter of the deceased. Perhaps there was surprise in their eyes at the realization, but she didn't see or hear anything past the murmurs and somber atmosphere in the bar. No one approached her, and she was left to drink away whatever feelings were perturbing her coiffed and poised self.

At some point in the night, the full weight of what had happened to her family fell upon her like a ton of bricks. She bolted out of the bar after throwing a few 20 dollar bills on the counter. By the time she got back to her motel, she was sobbing. She was grieving for the little girl she was. She was grieving for the two little boys who just lost their parents, just like she did. After a few hours, she had a weirdly abstract thought. By the time her father's sons were born, she'd already cut her mother off from her life. Within the short five years of their lives, all three of them had become orphans.

She made a decision then and there. The next morning she was at the lawyer's offices again. By the end of the year, she was the guardian of her two half-brothers.

Many Years and Feelings Later

A special day had come and gone for Isadora. Hector and Paris walked into the kitchen on their first morning as adults. Well, "adults" might have been stretching the meaning of the word. They were 18. Isadora had spent the morning making a big breakfast for them, something she'd become quite good at over the last thirteen years. She'd also found a semblance of peace with the horrible things which she had gone through, vicariously healing through her boys. And her boys was exactly what she'd come to think of them as. Their coming of age had been a watershed moment for her, but perhaps not as consequential as the first time they'd called her "mom" just two years after being a makeshift family.

The peace she'd found with her traumas was as fragile as the walls of hardened feelings she had once built around herself. The things she'd learned about her childhood in the years since had helped her a lot. Eventually, she had indeed opened her father's letter. It had changed her image of him from a coward with loose morals, to a man who had tried his best but ultimately failed to maintain the life he'd made for himself. His parent's divorce was hard on her, but it seemed to have been even harder on him. They both dealt with feelings of loss, in very different ways. He had been told several lies by her mother, just as Isadora once had. A masterclass in gaslighting left him thinking that the only thing he could possibly provide Isadora was financial assistance, which he had dutifully sent every single month to her mother, who had spent every cent on herself. Nothing obvious. There were no new cars on the driveway, or any telltale commodities. No, her mother had secretly been a gambler. Until Isadora's 18th birthday, her mother had made and lost more money than her ex-husband ever had, all on child support which Isadora had never seen.

The boys were as exculpable of all this as her father had been. She'd once or twice fought off a bitterness at the thought that he should have done more to be close to her. Perhaps reached out once she herself had turned 18. But eventually, she'd made peace with that as well. Perhaps her mother's lies to him had bore so deep, that he was thoroughly convinced that reaching out to Isadora would've led to a disturbance in her life, at best, and mutual heartbreak at worst. There's only so much heartbreak someone can take. Now she was the one with the 18 year old adults, and she was as close to her "sons" as she possibly could be. She was a changed woman. Not quite a new woman, but definitely evolving. After all, throughout the entirety of her raising the boys, she'd never even considered doing it with a partner. Not only had she maintained the anti-social behaviour, but she hadn't even gone for a one-night stand to scratch the itch. No, she had taken her single-mindedness and applied it to being the best mother she could be. The mother she wished she'd had and the mother the boys deserved. She never expected to be able to replace their biological mother, who by all accounts had been a lovely woman, much more worthy of the love of a good man like her father than Isadora's own.

Jude and Hector were strong boys, and had survived one of the worst things that can happen to a child, no matter their age. They'd grown up into strong men, who cherished and respected their half-sister to the point of calling her their mother. In fact, most of their friends didn't even know the technically correct relationship between them, but it was made obvious that the real relationship was of a mother and her two sons. The twins had an emotional intelligence which Isadora had grown up thinking was beyond the capacity of men, thanks to her mother's embittered ramblings about her father and men in general. Isadora was quite proud of them, and of herself for being able to take such credit. Their biological mother had set a great foundation for her to work from. She vividly remembers the first time the boys had caught her crying herself to sleep, and decided to join her in bed, as well as in her sorrows. It had been a beautiful, healing and transformative moment between three siblings who were still establishing the dynamic of their new family. She hadn't cried that hard since.

Nowadays, she knew that if the boys needed to cry, they felt comfortable enough doing so. No machismo, no pretense of inhuman strength and willpower... just souls with the same capacity for emotion as anyone else. So, as the boys made their way through their first day being 18, Isadora allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief, and watch them simply be, without the fog of a mother's instincts. Seeing the two as people maturing into something else was empowering to her. It made her realize that she had just as much growing to do. Perhaps starting with allowing her weaknesses to come through more often. Maybe even allowing herself to be open to a man who could prove to be as mature as her boys had turned out to be. She wouldn't go looking, necessarily, but maybe she wouldn't look away next time someone caught her attention.

That evening, she decided to do just that. She told her boys to order pizza because

"Mommy's going out to have some fun at the bar." The boys had looked at each other incredulously. They'd never heard her talk about anything close to going out for the night.

"Okay... be safe." Was all they said.

Coming Back Home to Real Men

The bar led to nowhere but one too many drinks. She didn't know how to approach people, and no one approached her either. If only she'd made some friends in the years since she had adopted the boys, she may have had someone alongside her to guide her through this madness that passed as socialization nowadays. She asked herself if maybe she had wasted her best years feeling sorry for herself. She certainly wasn't 25 anymore. In only a couple of years, she'd be marking her 4th decade on this Earth, with nothing to show for it where romance is concerned, aside from meaningless high school bullshit. With a sigh, she downed the last of her drink, paid her bill and left the bar. Little did she know, she was much closer to finding what she had been looking for with every inch she drew closer to home.

Upon entering her house, she noticed two things: one, Hector sat alone in the living room with a book in his hands. Second, Jude was uncharacteristically nowhere to be found. Hector jumped up to greet her, seemingly anxious.

"Hey! Didn't expect you back home yet, mom." He said with an odd tone, hurriedly giving her a hug before turning back around. But instead of finding his seat again, he seemed to start moving towards the bedrooms.

"Yeah, I guess the bar scene's not my scene." She replied, eyebrow raised as she watched him walk a bit too quickly away from the interaction.

"Oh. Haha." Was his retort.

"Don't let me interrupt your reading time. Where are you off to Heck?" She asked, trying to arrest him in place with her voice.

"Oh, uh... I gotta go to the bathroom, mom." He said, the last word ringing a bit too loudly for the syntax. Then she heard fumbling coming from somewhere in the house. Immediately, things clicked in her head. Hector was obviously covering for his missing brother, who was likely up to no good in his bedroom. Then she heard something slam. It sounded like a door, but couldn't be. It sounded smaller. She heard a grinding of wood on wood... like it was a drawer or something. More importantly, the sound came from her own bedroom. Isadora furrowed her brow and started a brisk march towards the sound.

"Where's your brother, Hector? What's he doing?" she asked rhetorically.

"I think he's in his bedroom." He replied "Hey, do you want me to make you a night cap, mom?" he asked, suddenly forgetting he needed the bathroom and trying to divert her attention to the kitchen.

"No, thank you." She replied with a tone obviously showing a stark lack of amusement. She walked right past Hector, who suddenly had his head down and wouldn't look her in the eye. She arrived at her bedroom door, turned the handle and swung it open with one smooth motion. What she saw was hard to describe. As if in slow motion, she witnessed Jude jumping for cover behind her bed, as if he could hide by going prone and maybe crawling under it. He thumped on the ground just as she yelled out his name.

"Jude, what the fuck are you doing?!" she yelled, with a hint of amusement in her voice at the sight of him in mid-air with a look of surprised horror on his face before hitting the ground.

"I... I-I was trying to play a prank on you." He said unconvincingly.

"You were going to jump-scare me!?" she replied indignantly.

"Sorry, mom." The younger of the twins replied. The silence in the air hung heavily. She turned back to Hector. He still wasn't looking in her direction. He wasn't smiling with the expected impishness of someone caught doing something he shouldn't have. No, he was wide-eyed, like someone who was caught something positively incriminating. She turned back to Jude and saw the same look. Something here was not right.