I sat next to my mom, the car's air conditioning drying sweat on my temples and in a thick trail down the small of my back. My mom and I have always been pretty close, regardless of the landmines in our past, but those landmines have always been the elephant in each of our rooms. We'd been wandering in Philippe Park and then we were back in the car, chatting aimiably about the huge renovations she and her husband have done on their house. I mentioned that it looks like a completely different house, which is when she looked at me out of the very corner of her eye and said, "I'm not afraid to stay in it anymore."
And there it was, like the flipping of a light switch in a room full of monsters, anticlimactic and over in seconds. It was the very first time she has ever acknowledged how scary those years were, the first time she's ever referred to them at all. In that moment I felt myself take one step closer to forgiving, to a place where all elephants become incorporeal and able to be blown away like smoke.
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