HAPPY FATHER’S DAY

by Mary K O'Melveny

On Father’s Day, I always remember

my mother. How she always

looked down rather than spoke up, how

she kept quiet when she should have

been loud against her oppression.

Her fear of failure not focused

on the man who undermined her

but on herself for failing to

be worthy of love. How she left

home for him, held her suitcase close,

stared out at farmlands, old churches, 

barnyards from the train window as

signs of her old life passed by her.

What promises kept her going?

I always wonder about that

man waiting for her at some Texas

depot, so different than the

one I knew later on. Or so

she always said when I

needed to believe it was true.

Twice married and divorced, he must

have known how innocence can fade

if not tended like a newly

seeded garden. Was he kind first,

gentling her fears? Did he laugh at

jokes in morning light, dance with

her at their honkytonk bar named

Yellow Rose of Texas? Somehow,

by the time he left for the war,

her conversion was completed.

I tried thinking of my parents

as birds. He, a hawk circling for

the most vulnerable prey. She,

cowering in some barn corner,
a timid chickadee afraid

of her shadow, always fearing

that she should have done more,

been more. Or, shrinking away from

limelight, bending toward safety

like a nervous turtledove.

Their nest, always precarious

as storms raged, was filled with psychic

debris and wishful thinking. Once,

she walked out our front door. She

wore a dull brown hat with a small

side feather, stared away when she

said goodbye. I remember how

my father slammed the door behind her,

then frightened us for the rest of

the day by not speaking a single word.

* * * * *

Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife in Washington, DC and Woodstock, NY. Mary, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is author of A Woman of a Certain Age and MERGING STAR HYPOTHESES (Finishing Line Press 2018, 2020) and co-author of the anthology An Apple In Her Hand (Codhill Press 2019).