My Mother Was a Storm

My mother was a storm. Not a thunderstorm that rolls through and moves on. No, she was a tempest that lingered—quiet one minute, screaming the next. I learned early that sunshine was only borrowed time. Her moods changed like skies over open water, and I was a small boat, learning to sail by instinct alone.

Some mornings she was dew on the windows, humming a lullaby while stirring oatmeal, her voice soft like the clouds after dawn. She’d kiss my forehead with the warmth of spring after rain, tuck a note in my lunch, and tell me I was her sunshine. I believed her. Those were the high-pressure days, bright and cloudless, when I could forget the night storms, the way thunder cracked from her throat like the heavens splitting open.

Other days, I woke to hail. Not real ice, but words sharp and fast—“Why can’t you just be quiet?” “You always make things worse!”—pelting me before I could put on my shoes. Her eyes would be lightning, wild and flickering. I’d watch her from across the kitchen, scanning for signs: the way her hands trembled, the clench in her jaw, the way her smile tried too hard. My mother could mask a downpour in lipstick and perfect posture. But I always knew.

At school, I envied children who had predictable parents—those whose mothers packed snacks, who clapped at recitals without shouting too loud or crying too hard. Mine once screamed at my fourth-grade teacher because I was sent to the principal’s office for forgetting my homework. She insisted I was a genius, misunderstood. “Like lightning, he strikes different!” she had roared, as if it were poetry.

When I was ten, she didn’t come out of her room for four days. The air in the house grew thick, unmoving, like a heat wave pressing down on every surface. I left food outside her door. On the fifth day, she emerged in a sundress, smelling like lilacs and vodka, and said, “Let’s go on an adventure!” We drove to the lake. She waded in fully clothed, laughing like thunder on the edge of madness. I sat on the sand and waited for the storm to pass.

No one ever told me she was bipolar. They just said she was “sensitive,” “artistic,” “a little off.” But I knew. I knew in the way animals sense a quake before it comes. I felt the tremors in her silences and the tidal pull of her joy. She danced barefoot on broken glass, mistaking it for stardust. And I—her only son—became both anchor and observer.

When I turned sixteen, the storms got worse. Her mania became wildfire. She stayed up for days, painting murals on the garage wall and calling neighbors at 3 a.m. to tell them they were “light beings.” Then came the hurricanes—long, loud arguments with herself, with God, with me. I stopped trying to talk her down. You don’t reason with a hurricane. You board up the windows, wait, and hope the foundation holds.

But sometimes… sometimes she was calm.

On one of those days, I found her on the porch at sunrise, sipping tea, eyes clear and distant. “Do you hate me?” she asked softly.

“No,” I said. And I meant it.

She nodded, as if that answer settled something eternal. “You were always stronger than me,” she whispered. “You held the umbrella.”

I wanted to cry then, but I didn’t. I sat beside her, listening to the morning birds, breathing in the stillness. That moment was the eye of the storm.

She died the following spring. Not suddenly—storms like her don’t vanish without a warning. But by the time she went, she had become a low wind, a whisper, a drizzle on the roof. The fire in her had dimmed. And then, one day, she simply didn’t wake up. They said it was natural causes, but I knew better. She had weathered too many winters of the soul.

I stood at her grave and looked up at the sky. It was overcast—gray but dry. The kind of day she might have painted in watercolor and called “soft sorrow.”

People say I’m like her. I write poems and forget my keys. I pace when the rain falls, as if I can hear her in the thunder. And when my own son asks about her, I say:

“She was a storm, my love. Fierce and wild. Beautiful and dangerous. She taught me how to stand in the wind.”

He asks if I miss her. I smile.

“Every time it rains.”