Okay, so this is just a little short story, no truth to it at all, told from the POV of a teenager. Put yourself in the mind and thoughts of a young person, and describe a family trauma, not necessarily yours. There are many universal traumas to work from.
Mom Melts Away
It had been a long year. Mom up and left Dad when we took that trip to Disney World we’d been saving up for for eons. It just seemed as though the thing we had hoped and dreamed about was not as magic as anticipated.
The lines were long. The weather hot, the bathrooms clean but hard to find, the food expensive, and worst of all, none of us expected to walk the six miles that a Day in Disney requires.
Mom’s patience was zero with Dad because he had hurt his knee doing something “fantastically stupid” the day we arrived in Florida, and that stupid thing was trying to lift up and push a stuck car out of the sand. A young driver who just happened to be a very pretty girl drove off the pavement at the beach parking lot, and Dad heroically tried lifting and pushing her car so it would roll back onto the pavement (theoretically). All this while Mom stood there with her hands on her hips, watching, and I stood there watching Mom. If I had been a boy, I would have tried to help Dad, but since I was not, and I was speechless that Dad would be so silly, all for a pretty girl, it didn’t occur to me to get into a help mode.
So Dad blew his knee out the day we arrived at Disney, after the long drive from Iowa. Ice didn’t cure it, but there were wheelchairs galore to be had. Dad wouldn’t ride in one. He walked around with a pair of Walgreen crutches, sweating in pain.
And while we stood in line at the Pirates of the Caribbean, he refused to get in the shorter handicapped line, which we could have joined him in. That’s when Mom just melted away.
“I’ll be right back, got to go to the bathroom,” was what she said. And then she was gone, and gone. She texted us about an hour later. We had boarded the ride without her, and although I loved the long tunnel and the animated pirates and the whooshing water that carried Dad and I along the fake underground river with all the other people on the ride, I could not enjoy it at all. Where WAS mom?
Her text to Dad read. . . “I’m at the airport. Going to see my parents in Boston. They need me.”
“What the hell?” Dad yelled. I was furious, because I sure didn’t want to be the one left behind to take care of Dad. It took me a month of crying on the phone begging Mom to come home before she finally came. But she wasn’t staying, she stuck all her stuff in a storage unit during one big moving blitz, and then she asked me, “Do you want to live in Boston or do you want to live here?”
I don’t know why I chose Iowa, maybe it was because I was finally captain of the girl’s soccer team during my senior year of high school. But I did choose Iowa, and two months later, was engaged to that moron Sam Taylor. He wouldn’t take No for an answer, claimed he thought I didn’t mean it. And here’s Mom on the phone telling me she’s not coming out for any shotgun wedding. She won’t be a part of that, so she says. However, she will pay for an airline ticket to Boston if I want to back out. “He’ll get over it,” she said. “You owe him nothing.”