Chapter Five: "Living With A Workaholic"

Before the wreck, my mother really was a clean and collected person. Her blond curls twirled down her back and fell around her face in perfect locks resembling something like a double helix, intertwined genetic data. She had clear, crystal eyes. Technically blue but so light and clean it resembled more like looking through a telescope pointed upward towards a clear sky. She was a banker, always occupied with her ever-important job. Her career was soaring, her pay increasing. I’ll just work a bit longer and then I can make enough to stay home more, only a little bit I promise. No honey I can’t make it your spelling bee I need to work. I know you’re upset. Please honey, I promise I’ll make it up to you, I just need to work a bit longer...

My father was a writer. Not a particularly successful one, either. He has published a total of four books; The first one was a bibliography for a man who doesn’t exist, and the second about an ex-lion tamer trying to start a new life. He loved fantasy, but tended to keep it realistic.

I’ve read his work, it’s safe to say he’s pretty good. I appreciated the first one, especially because the biography seemed to not only be about a fictional man, but a fictional man who had no importance to anything. Not even fictionally, just an imaginary Average Joe.

He made little to no money, but he never had to. My mother provided for everything. He was a kind man, even when he didn’t make the smartest choices, he meant well.

My mother had a history of mental trauma, and after a three-year battle with Bipolar Disorder in her teens she had been deemed “mentally stable.” But the wreck- when her building stress cracked alongside with her skull, her repressed insanity bleeding out onto the broken windshield and over her eyes, growing ever-more clouded. That was when it really started.

It turns out my mother was two months pregnant, but so far no one had known. Three disoriented and flustered months later due to her amounting stress of a medically unstable son, an anxious husband, and not being allowed to work, her body finally gave in and she went into early labor. I barely remember it, I had just gotten out of the hospital, I was awoken around six AM to my mother yelling something like;

“NO, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING! YOU’RE PATHETIC YOU DUMB BRUTE JUST- GOD DAMN IT GET IN THE F*****G CAR! JUST START THE DAMN CAR I CAN MAKE IT ON MY OWN. DON’T TOUCH ME YOU LUMMOX!”

I lost my baby sister that day.

I never met her, so it meant practically nothing to little six year old Lionel. But my mother was thrown into chaotic depression, and my father was determined to keep her healthy, happy, and alive while simultaneously grieving for a lost daughter and caring for a chimeric son.

She never fully recovered, and my father went white by the age of 35. When I was fifteen, my mother tried to strangle my father, and she started going into therapy.

And yet- my father never left her side. It’s stuff like that that makes people say he’s a stupid and admirable sweetheart. He didn’t know what else to do, he was in love with an insane woman and his distant medically unstable son. In her mood swings, she hated him. She’d yell, she’d throw things, she’d banter on about how she wanted a divorce. But it would end in time.
I never got the heat of her rage, she barely acknowledged my existence, which was fine by me, because I saw how she treated my father and I wanted no part of it. After she broke a vase and threatened to kill everyone in her path, she was arrested and sent to an asylum.
My father published a very popular book half a year later, titled “Living With A Workaholic” and four years later “The Traumatic Tolls Of Chimerism”.

Reviews

[Ras Fish]

I feel that family is the hardest park of a background story, but you did a great job with it. The family is well thought up and as always great character visualization.

[Ivy Navillus]

I love his Dad, so much. o uo

[Ras Fish]

yeah, he kind of reminds me of a stereotypical dorky writer father xD and I think it works great with the story.

[Ivy Navillus]

I've always wanted one of those XD

[Ras Fish]

Yeah, that would be great.