Sunday, March 1, 2015

Someone who looks like Father

Otousan ni nita hito

I've never met the Pumpkin Daddy's grandfather. He'd passed away a few years before I even met the Pumpkin Daddy. In pictures, he's tall and handsome. The Pumpkin Daddy looks a bit like his mother, and looks a lot like his uncle, so I always thought that the height and chiseled features came from his mother's side of the family.

Yesterday, we went to his mom's house, and the Pumpkin Daddy started going through some old pictures, sorting the ones of himself from the rest of the photos (I think the plan is to scan . His mom abruptly grabbed one of the pictures and handed it to me, saying it was the Pumpkin Daddy's dad. The man in the picture looked exactly like the Pumpkin Daddy, tall and handsome. His mom married him when she was something like 20 years old. She probably fell for his looks…because he reminded her of her own father, perhaps? 

And then, the man treated her and their children badly, and eventually left them. So what is it like to love her sons more than anything in the entire world, and yet be reminded of all the bad stuff that happened every time she looked at them?