Uneven
My son is fourteen
and he knows everything.
That’s supposed to happen – I know.
People joked about it for years;
I never felt what they meant until now…
this uneven thing in my mind.
Two parents.
A house in the country.
Good school, nothing dangerous nearby.
Life handed to him clean,
and he takes it clean…
why wouldn’t he?
He doesn’t even see it as a gift.
That was the point.
That was the fight.
We were chopping onions the other day
and I tried an analogy – it wasn’t great.
I said life’s like a tree trunk:
each ring a year, a scar, a lesson.
He’s the new wood, pale and soft.
I’m the darker rings beneath,
tight with storms.
He didn’t say much.
Just kept chopping.
In three years he’ll be seventeen.
At eighteen, I was dropping a pink carnation
into the river where my mum used to sit.
A week dead. Fifty-seven.
The rented flat gone with her.
An adult – legally, technically…
but really just a kid with no income,
nowhere to go,
no one coming.
I remember him at seven
explaining how something worked,
so certain and so wrong,
and I let him have it.
That’s what seven is.
At fourteen it’s the same…
the same certainty…
but now it sits uneven with me.
Not because he’s wrong,
but because he doesn’t know he could be.
Because the ground has never
dropped out from under him.
Because I made sure of that.
Eighteen: homeless.
Five years: drugs.
Ten more: alcohol.
Crawling back.
Moving country.
Building this.
The house.
The safety.
The clean life he wears
like it was always his.
And now he stands there, fourteen,
chopping onions,
and in his eyes I see it…
that youthful certainty
I fought for him to have.
I watch his hands,
pale new wood,
unaware of the darker rings beneath.
And I think:
he’s living the life I built for him,
and I can’t tell him what it cost.
Because telling him would break it.
His bravado is my victory.
His blindness is proof I succeeded.
And still it sits there…
uneven…
in my mind.
- UpsilonA
Believe