Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [17]
Later in the afternoon, while my brother was climbing in the tree, he lost his grip and fell to the pavement. Landing on his wrist, he screamed, and as he held it before me, I saw it begin to swell and slowly turn black-and-blue. We wondered aloud whether it was broken. We wondered whether we should disobey our mom and head into the hospital to tell her about it, and whether it might even need a cast.
We didn’t move, though. We couldn’t. In the end, my sister would recover, and we’d learn that Micah’s wrist was sprained, not broken, but at the time, we knew nothing. Instead, we sat together with fear in our hearts, just the two of us, not saying much to each other the rest of the afternoon.
CHAPTER 4
After listening to Micah’s admonition about cheating myself of the excitement about our trip around the world, I hung up the phone, thinking about what he’d said. What Cathy had been saying. What my agent had been saying. What everyone, in fact, had been saying about the trip whenever I’d mentioned it. Despite the logical arguments, despite the fact that it had been my idea to go, I still couldn’t summon any excitement about the trip.
It’s not that I spent my days under a cloud of doom and gloom. Yes, I was busy, but to be honest, I found tremendous satisfaction in all that I was doing. My wife was right; I was busy because I liked being busy. Perhaps, I mused, the problem was that all my energies were focused in only three areas—father, husband, and writer—with little time for anything else. As long as things fit into these neat little boxes that I’d constructed for myself, I felt in control. Not only could I function, but I could thrive. But because it was all I could do to keep up in these three areas, the idea of stepping outside the boxes to do new things—travel, adventure, or spending three weeks with my brother—not only seemed impossible, but struck me as a trade-off I would regret. And in a rare moment of clarity in an otherwise foggy year, I suddenly realized that I had begun to take this to extremes.
If I couldn’t even find excitement in the idea of taking a trip around the world, what kind of person was I? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stay that way forever. Somehow, I needed to find my balance again.
Of course, there are thousands of books and talk shows offering ways to straighten out your life, and experts of every variety claim to have the answers. Intinctively, though, I wanted to figure things out with the help of the one person in my life who had lived through the same things I had: my brother.
Micah had had his own struggles over the last three years, particularly about his faith. For the most part, he’d abandoned prayer, and discussing faith had become uncomfortable to him. His wife, Christine, had talked to me about her concerns a couple of times—she was devout in her Christian beliefs, as Micah himself had once been—and I slowly began to realize that somehow there was a chance we could help each other. And in that way, I began to think of the trip less as a journey around the world than a journey to rediscover who I was and how I’d developed the way I had.
When I reflected on my childhood, I usually recalled it as light without shadow, as if the dark edges never existed. Or if they did, they were something to be reveled in, like badges of honor. Dangerous events were transformed over the years into humorous anecdotes; painful moments were modified into sweet tales of innocence. In the past, when asked about my parents, I usually responded that my mom and dad were both ordinary and typical, as was my childhood. Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that while my comments were true in some ways, they rang false in others, and it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I finally began to understand the daily pressures that must have plagued both of them. Parenthood is fraught with worry, and my parents—despite the long leash they gave us—no doubt worried about us frequently. But if raising children is difficult, I’ve learned that marriage