by Libby Gerdes
“I wanna make you fall in love as hard as my poor parents’ teenage daughter,” I sang along to Phoebe Bridgers as I drove through Kentucky countryside in the floral delivery van.
Though I was twenty-two, that line still pierced. I vividly remembered sobbing in my ex’s oversized sweatshirt every night at seventeen; it wasn’t enough to sleep with the sweatshirt like a safety blanket. I had to be in it, swallowed by lingering scent, to feel calm enough to drift off and dream.
This experience is, of course, not rare, I thought, winding on the road under green canopies. It’s formative, in fact, and I can’t imagine having not had it. Heartbreak as in the realization that the heart itself, can actually, physically ache. And heartbreak as a verb, too—the act of being internally broken, irrevocably changed.
As I drove, it dawned on me that my father had never experienced this kind of heartbreak. Though my father married not as young at twenty-five, my mother is the only woman he had ever dated. Their first date was a college military ball, and the rest was history.
But no, I realize, and correct myself: my father has had his heart broken. Because I was his first heartbreak.
***
My father, James Gerdes II, born on a military base himself during the Vietnam War, joined ROTC in college and enlisted afterwards in 1994.
I was born in June 2001. Like the rest of the world, my father could not have predicted 9/11 when enlisting. He got deployed to Afghanistan in late 2002, mere days after my mother found out she was pregnant with my brother.
I delivered the news. She dressed me in a “Big sister” shirt, handed me the pregnancy test, and said “Bring this to Daddy!” He didn’t know what the test was, but the shirt clued him in soon enough.
My dad’s deployment time was nine months. They didn’t know if he would make it home in time for my brother’s birth.
Before he left, he recorded us on a tape recorder so I could still hear his voice while he was gone. I’ve listened to it many times since, marveling at how my own voice could ever sound so young.
For those nine months, my parents wrote each other love notes. My mom told me she’s never felt more loved in her life than that time. Once, he sent her a dozen roses, and I cried because I didn’t get anything from him. The next day, a dozen roses arrived for me (and again I cried when she threw away the wilted bouquet a few weeks later).
He sent us matching stuffed animals that we still have. My mom sent him pictures of each ultrasound as my brother’s features formulated. Though they decided not to find out my sex, at my mom’s twelve-week appointment she asked the ultrasound nurse to write JT’s in a sealed envelope, which she mailed it to my dad.
***
When he got back, I’d lived a third more of my life.
Though our mantle held a picture of me holding a handmade “Welcome Home” sign that was the size of my whole body, my dad didn’t tell me about the actuality of our reunion until a few years ago.
“You just looked at me confused. Maybe even a little mad. And turned away into your mother’s legs.” He choked on his words. “That moment, with your small back to me, broke my heart.”
I understood my young hesitancy. His deployment was my first experience of people leaving. Even though he didn’t want to go, and it agonized him to do it, you can only tell a child that their father is coming back for so many months of their short life until they stop believing it. I’d learned to expect his absence, to live without and distrust him.
And I understood why he hadn’t told me before. Sometimes, when I picture that moment from his eyes, I cry for him.
In an instant, he decided to retire from the military. Though he liked many aspects of it—the camaraderie, the order, the use of the body as a part of something bigger—none of it was worth it anymore. He couldn’t do that to me again. And he wouldn’t do it to his second, or third, child ever.
A week after his return, my brother JT (James III) was born. After labor and delivery, when things had calmed, my dad handed my mother the sealed envelope.
“You never opened it,” she said. It was a statement, not a question, though he hadn’t mentioned it before.
***
Once, early on in his deployment, my aunt and cousin were at our house. My mom had people over often. She embraced the help, the company. Sometimes, pregnancy and a two-year-old made her more lonesome than if she were alone.
My cousin and I were playing in another room while our moms did chores. My uncle walked in, and my aunt said “Daddy’s here!” I ran up to the door, ecstatic, to find my uncle. I cried inconsolably.
I don’t know if it would’ve been better or worse if I was old enough to understand. If I was older, I could still remember firsthand how it felt. If I was just a bit older, I could’ve understood time at least somewhat, could’ve counted the squares on the calendar until the red-circled date.
Though I don’t remember it firsthand, I still cry sometimes when I picture myself toddling to the door to find a father that wasn’t mine, crying and crying until I couldn’t anymore. The thought of how much it must’ve hurt someone so small is maybe worse than remembering how the pain felt. Maybe it’s not. But either way, I think he was actually my first heartbreak, too.
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Libby Gerdes is a journalist with the Southern Illinoisan who will begin studies for a MFA in Poetry at Southern Illinois University in fall 2024. She has work published or forthcoming in The Quarter(ly) Press, Runestone Literary Journal, Assignment, and Bluebird Review.
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