I didn't know why I started thinking about my father then.
At what was undoubtedly the worst moment of my life, with pain leaving so little room for anything else, I found myself wondering what had happened to him.
Why he had changed.
In my earliest memories, he had been a loving father. A loving husband, too.
Then, little by little, that man had disappeared.
Eventually, he started hitting my mother.
And me.
My mother told me his business had failed. That he had never recovered from it—not really—and that the disappointment had turned into frustration he took out on us.
I understood the explanation.
I had never understood the choice.
My mother had supported him. She had stayed beside him when things went wrong.
So why?
Was failure enough to change someone that much?
I had failed plenty of times myself. I knew the frustration. The anger that simmered beneath everything, waiting for the smallest reason to surface.
