A Storm at Peace

Noah had finished his dinner ages ago but hadn’t yet asked to be excused from the table. It didn’t seem like a good time to interrupt what was taking place at the dinner table that evening. It had started so well, he thought, he told them about his math test and his friend’s new bike. Then his aunt had asked her sister, his mother, if she remembered their old bike. About forty minutes have passed since then, yet they seemingly haven’t taken a break to catch their breath. 

His aunt pointed her fork accusingly at her sister, “You don’t even know how hard it was for me, you never called, not once.”

His mother scoffed, “It’s always about you isn’t it? Did you ever think about what I was going through, what I suffered?”

“I was a child! I never should have had to worry about your feelings back then!” His aunt shook in her seat with barely contained frustration. 

“Well you must still be a child then, because you don’t worry about my feelings now do you?”

The TV was on but the sound was ignored, all that was heard was them. They had made their way into the living room by now, but the argument never lost its momentum. Noah quietly picked up his blanket and went to his room. He knew he should brush his teeth before bed but he also knew that no one would notice if he didn’t. 

The next morning he got ready for school and slowly came downstairs, listening for any signs of conflict. He got to the stairs landing and sighed when he heard their voices rising in the kitchen. He honestly couldn’t tell if they slept or if they just fought straight through the night. His mom was at the stove but the eggs she had been scrambling had long gone burnt. So he opted to get himself a bowl of cereal instead. 

“Mom was never as hard on you as she was on me.” He dodged the spatula his mom waved around as she spoke while he reached behind her for a spoon.

His aunt was busy packing his lunch bag at the kitchen table. He wanted to tell her that she had already added three juice boxes to the bag, but he decided to stay silent. Noah chose to stay silent a lot. “How would you know?” She asked as she paused her packing to ruffle his hair as he sat down beside her. “You weren’t ever there to see how she treated me.”

“You were always the favorite, she let you do everything. I couldn’t even paint my nails until I was in high school.” His mom added salt to the scrambled eggs that, at this point, had become unrecognizable. 

“Don’t even act like you know anything about my life. All you do is make these assumptions without ever even asking me how I felt!” His aunt struggled to cram a bag of chips into the bag, not realizing that the three juice boxes were impeding this effort.

“I couldn’t even drive my car anywhere! I could only take it to school!”

“What are you even talking about, are you even listening to me?” His aunt gave up on adding the chips to the bag and added a fourth juice box and zipped it up. 

He needed milk for his cereal but he didn’t want to interrupt to ask, and he wasn’t allowed to pour his own milk until he turned eight. So he settled for munching on the dry flakes and completing the maze on the back of the cereal box, for the fourth time that week. He had gotten pretty good at it. 

“I looked up to you, you know that? You were my cool big sister. I wanted to be just like you so badly. But then you left and forgot about me, all you’ve done is let me down.”

“You’ve always been so ungrateful, you don’t get to say that to me after all I’ve done for you. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have anyone.”

The little boy chewed on his dry corn flakes and thought to himself, ‘when will they realize that all they have is each other?’ But he didn’t say that out loud, he just put his bowl in the sink and grabbed his lunch box. For a moment Noah stood in the entryway to the kitchen and looked at the two most important women in his life as they fought about… what were they fighting about again? He had heard this same fight so many times; it wasn’t a lot of similar fights as much as it was one very long, continuous fight. One that rolled along like a snowball, gaining size and speed with time until it was an unstoppable avalanche obliterating everything in its wake. 

It would be many years before he would ask them how this great and unending fight started, but no matter how many years went by, their answer would always be the same: they didn’t know. Sometimes he wondered if they loved each other. Maybe their love for each other looked different than his love for them? He wondered who had done this to them who made them full of such hurt and anger, and why weren’t they taking it out on that person instead of each other? There were many things Noah didn’t understand but, then again, he was only not-quite-eight years old. 

Sometimes, after a nightmare, he would get up and go to his mom’s room and his aunt would be there, with her head on her sister’s pillow; the both of them sleeping peacefully. He would snuggle between them and they would pull him close. He savored those moments. Sometimes, his mom would yelp in the kitchen and his aunt would drop whatever she was doing and run to see what’s wrong. Sometimes, his aunt would come home from a date, rain-soaked and crying and her sister would be there with a towel to hold her and dry her tears. These small truces in their never-ending quarrel were calm waters in the midst of an unrelenting storm. 

One night the storm was raging and he was playing on his iPad with his headphones in, trying to block out the sound. In doing so he missed something interesting that happened. 

The sisters were face to face, hurling words at each other, some of these words were just adding to old bruises but others opened new wounds. Things had escalated to a point that had never been reached before. 

His mother spoke, “Just…just stop, please. I’m so tired. I’m tired of being like this.”

Her sister took some deep breaths before dropping down onto the couch, rubbing her face with a sigh, “Have we always been like this? I can’t remember a time when we weren’t fighting. I see other sisters that laugh and joke and-and say sweet things to each other and I… I envy them.”

His mother shrugged dismissively, “We laugh sometimes.” She glanced at her sister for confirmation before frowning slightly, “...don’t we?”

Her sister smiled, “We do, no one is funnier than we are.”

His mother chuckled before staring thoughtfully at the photo above their TV, “Sometimes I just get so angry, I’m not even angry at you I’m just-” She paused looking for the right words, before realizing there were no right words for this kind of situation. “I’m just angry, and I don’t know why.”

Her sister nodded, “I’m not angry at you either.”

His mother continued, “I think I’m angry about what I’ve lost, maybe? I feel like my life wasn’t my own, my childhood wasn’t my own. So many things were out of my control, but when I look at you.” She took a moment to look at her sister before she hung her head, ashamed. “I get jealous.”

Her younger sister’s eyes widened in shock, “Why would you be jealous of me? After you moved out all mom and dad would say was ‘why don’t you try being more like your sister’ and ‘your sister would never do that’. I felt like your shadow lingered even after you left.” She scratched her neck, embarrassed. “I felt like no matter what, I could never catch up to the legacy you left.”

They sat in silence for a bit. 

The older sister sighed heavily, “There’s probably a lot of things we haven’t really understood about each other, it will probably take a while before we do understand.” She took a moment and stared at her hands, then cleared her throat, “But I’ll start with saying this: I’m sorry I’ve spent all these years not listening to you. You’ve been telling me over and over again that I abandoned you but I think I just didn’t want to admit I had done wrong. But in the end you were just a kid. I failed you as an older sister, I didn’t notice you were hurting.”

The younger sister listened to this, and nodded, and tried so so hard to hold back the tears that were trying to escape; but in the end the tears won out. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs as she realized her sister said the words she had been waiting to hear for the past twenty years. The older sister drew her close and rested her chin on her little sister’s head, rubbing her back in soothing circles, just like she used to do when they were younger. Though muffled by the tears and the blanket she could make out two very important words from her younger sister repeated over and over again, “I’m sorry.”

The next morning Noah awoke and the house was quiet. He slowly crept downstairs and entered the living room. There he saw the two sisters soundly asleep, holding each other tightly. He smiled and climbed onto the couch and snuggled between them. This probably wasn’t the last fight they would have, maybe not even the worst fight they would have. But Noah is content because, for a moment, they are a family at peace.