Parent-sickness

One summer my mother went to Maine for about a week, though at that age a week felt nearly geological.

An era.

My sister and I stayed with my grandmother at the cottage on the Bay.

Ordinarily this sounds idyllic, and in many ways it was.

The cottage was one of those places children should remember as pure happiness—screen doors slapping shut, sun on dock boards, lake-smell and cedar, gull cries, the particular hush of evening over water. Days were full enough with cousins, swimming, beach stones, the little freedoms that make summer seem almost borderless.

I had fun.

That is true.

But another truth ran underneath it.

At night, I missed my parents terribly.

Not abstractly.

Physically.

Like a hurt.

I was young enough not to understand why we were staying with Grandma instead of simply remaining at home with my father. I only later understood the practical reason: he was working nights and we were too small to be left in that arrangement.

But children do not read life through practicalities.

They read absence.

And absence can feel enormous.

Night was hardest.

Day distracted.

Night enlarged everything.

The unfamiliar bed.

The darkness around a summer cottage.

Water sounds against shore.

Adults downstairs talking after you’re supposed to be asleep.

And a child suddenly realizing home is elsewhere.

I remember lying there with a kind of ache I had no language for.

Homesickness before I knew the word.

Or maybe not homesickness exactly.

Parent-sickness.

And then my father would visit.

This part undoes me now.

He would drive out to the cottage to see us between work and obligations, appearing almost like a visitation from ordinary life. The arrival itself was joy.

Dad’s here.

The world righted.

But then he would have to leave.

And I would cry when he drove away.

I can see it still, or imagine it through feeling—the car pulling out, gravel maybe under tires, taillights or afternoon sun flashing off the windshield, and me overcome by the simple devastation of departure.

There is something so pure in childhood grief over someone merely going home.

No philosophy.

No stoicism.

Just heartbreak.

Stay.

I think what wounds me in the memory now is imagining what that may have been like for him.

To come visit your children and leave one of them in tears.

Did he carry that in the car on the way back?

Did he feel helpless?

Did he think I would forget it in five minutes?

I never asked.

As children we rarely think the pain of separation works both ways.

But now, as a father, I wonder.

Because I know what it is to leave a child who does not want you to go.

And how it catches in the chest.

This may have been one of my first experiences of love revealed through absence.

When people are constantly present, children take them as atmospheric.

Like weather.

Like gravity.

It sometimes takes a temporary separation to realize how much they are the shape of your world.

Perhaps that is what I was discovering in tears at the cottage.

That my father and mother were not simply the background of life.

They were home itself.

And the Bay setting sharpens the memory rather than softens it.

Because beauty does not cancel longing.

Sometimes it heightens it.

I can hold both now:

The sweetness of summer at the cottage.

And the sorrow of watching my father leave.

They belong together.

My father was working nights then—already laboring hard enough that his children had to be farmed out for care while their mother was gone.

Even this tender memory carries the undertone of his effort for us.

Work sits behind the scene, almost invisible but structuring it.

He came because he made time.

Despite fatigue.

Despite shifts.

He drove to the Bay so his children would feel him near.

That matters.

So often his love arrived this way—through showing up.

Driving the long road.

Visiting the cottage.

Coming when he could.

And perhaps that is why the memory remains luminous.

Because it contains one of the simplest truths about childhood love:

sometimes you do not know how much you belong to someone until you watch them pull away in a car and start crying.

I think now of the Bay at dusk, water going silver, my grandmother moving around the cottage kitchen, screen door creaking, and somewhere on the road my father heading back toward work.

And a small boy learning, in the oldest way possible,

what missing someone feels like.