MY MOTHER LEFT US when I was three, and it was okay, just Dad and me. He did his best. But looking back, I can see how lonely he was, how her decision to abandon us had hit him like a 10-ton truck, parked on his heart for years. For me, it was an early lesson that no one was ever going to put me first, unless I did myself. Perhaps it was something my mother also learned, a little too late.
When my father met Sheena, a widow, another single parent with twin girls, he started caring about his appearance. He used words like “snazzy” and “adorable.” “You’re looking snazzy, Cindy,” he would say, and my heart would contract with warning, that here was a metamorphosis over which I…
