My Parents

Ladero

Rating: G
Diclaimer: Do not now nor have I ever owned these characters. I'm currently borrowing them a while.

A/N: This is companion piece to "This Man" and "This Woman."

kursk-you asked for this but I don't think you knew what we'd be in for.

She looks so small sitting there by herself, so silent and so small. All my life she's been the driving force in our family. She said that she was ready for this, that she had prepared herself for life after Dad. I believed her when she said that she would be okay. She's not okay. It's like the life has been drained from her. I wish she would laugh or smile, but it seems she lost those abilities the night we lost Dad. For thirty years, they had been a team, a team that took on the world and won. My parents were like the perfect couple. Not the sort of perfect where everything is always right, but the kind of perfect where you knew there were no two people better suited for one another.

My parents were great. They were busy people with enormously demanding jobs, but their jobs in government were always secondary to their jobs as parents. Dad was the fun one, the kind of Dad who thinks it's perfectly okay that his kids have ice cream for lunch, if that's their choice. He was our personal jungle gym when we were kids; we loved climbing all over him. He couldn't walk in the door of our house without one or all of us jumping on him. Picture this: the great political bulldog, laughing as he tries to put down his briefcase with two small girls in his arms and a slightly older boy standing on his foot and clinging to his leg. It might be hard for those who knew his public persona to imagine, but that was our Dad. The man who, once upon a time, practically lived in his office, rarely came home after 6 and never missed one of my baseball games. He wanted to coach my little league team, but Mom said he was just a little too intense for that gig. She was right, of course. I can't count the number of times she had to tell him to stop yelling at the ref during my games. He was a passionate guy, what can I say. Mom was the tempering force for him. She calmed him. When he got riled up, she was the only one who could bring him back down. She was the calm at the center of the storm that was our family. She's the kind of mother every kid dreams of, even though there were times during their teenage years that my sisters didn't seem to think so. She learned to bake for us. She had this mental image of a mother that has fresh baked cookie waiting for her kids after school, so once she found out she was pregnant with me learning to bake became her mission. Dad loved to tell stories of how on Saturday mornings she'd be up at the crack of dawn baking in the kitchen. Perhaps I should say attempting to bake because Dad always said that some of the stuff she forced him to try was horrible. Much to his relief, and his stomach's relief, she eventually got the hang of it. Her peanut butter chocolate chip cookies are still my favorite food. She was fun in a different way than Dad. Sometimes when we were just sitting around talking or watching TV, she'd just start tickling someone. The person being tickled would call for back up and before you knew it the whole family would be in the midst of a tickle war. Little moments like that are some of my favorite childhood memories. My parents made my childhood great. They raised us to be kind, honest, and passionate people. They respected our choices and let us make our mistakes, but were always willing to help us pick up the pieces.

All my life they seemed like such big people. Big hearts, big minds, big personalities. They seemed invincible, like there was nothing that could break them. There she sits, so small now, so very broken without him. My parents were the perfect pair, Joshua and Donnatella Lyman. They were a pair and now it's just her. I don't think we realized how much depended on them being a pair. Without him her spark is gone, and I'm afraid that she'll soon be gone. It seems that in losing one of my parents, I've lost them both.