Free My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan

would become another absence, another shadow. When my father began his new life as husband and father, the journey he had taken to arrive at this moment—through a childhood of poverty and abandonment and displacement, through an adolescence of cautious, self-conscious deference to the grandparents who had taken him in—did not matter. It was this new life he cared about, one solely of his own making, like a robe of silk he might sew and slip into, concealing the self that had suffered and didn’t care to talk about it.

17
    Ed and Ange moved into student housing, and my father became a college man, unlike any of the Forhan men before him. Many of his uncles—his father’s brothers—had not even finished high school; they had honored the family tradition of turning to common labor: they were mechanics and truck drivers and filling station attendants. My father would not be a Forhan in that way, nor in his behavior as a husband and father. He would do his duty. He would be responsible. His life was his own, to make as he desired. He just needed to set himself to the task.
    And he did, taking a job in the student union cafeteria and studying hard. He wanted that business degree, that sharp suit and tie, that briefcase, that desk, that secretary, that steady, respectable, growing salary.
    Halfway through Ed’s first university term, the baby was born: a girl, my oldest sister. They named her Theresa Lee, after two saints, the first one sanctified by Rome, the second one—the baby’s kind and gentle stepgrandfather—by my mother.
    Although Ed was distracted by his studies and Ange by motherhood, and although their first winter together was Seattle’s worst on record—repeated harsh arctic blasts and snowfall that shut down the city—they were happy, mainly, according to my mother. They were making something: a family, a future. Both knew their roles and flourished in them. Ange’s was to keep the household running smoothly. On her first Mother’s Day, she received from Ed a mass-manufactured greeting card, on the front of which was a drawing of a harried housewife wearing a pink knee-length dress, a blue frilly apron, and black pumps. She was removing a hot pie from the oven with her right hand and gripping the handle of a pot of steaming vegetables with her left. The printed message:
    Though you keep busy ’round the house
    And take things as they come,
    Please take time out on Mother’s Day
    To love your old man some!
    On the inside of the card, the wife had her hands full still, holding a broom and a mop and her husband’s shoulder. The gift for her on this special day: a plea that, in the midst of her interminable, mindless labor, she devote some attention to her needy husband.
    The same quaint and frightening pre–Betty Friedan world of gender expectations gave birth to this store-bought Valentine’s message my mother gave to my father:
    Some husbands ask for homemade pies
    And then refuse to eat ’em—
    Some husbands boss their wives around . . .
    And now and then they beat ’em . . .
    But mine is such an angel,
    So different from the rest . . .
    That I’m gonna buy a pair o’ wings
    And sew them to his vest!
    Being neither a cloddish ingrate nor a bully and abuser, Ed must have been heaven-sent. Of course, to buy those wings, Ange might have had to ask him for a temporary increase in her household allowance.
    Before Theresa—Terry, as she was called—was a year old, Ange was pregnant again. She herself was still a kid, only eighteen, and not long before had been living cheerlessly in the house of her mother, a woman whom she had come to understand existed in a kind of permanent Norwegian bleakness and rigidity. In leaving that home, Ange had entered a taxing life of her own, but, still, it was her life, and it had some fun in it. She had no desire to return to that house in Wedgwood, but, in