The love I'd promised myself to find

Rhona learned pretty early that love was not always a beautiful thing.

Most times, love was a woman sitting alone at the edge of her bed at 2am, trying not to cry from the pain of it because her children were sleeping in the other room. Several times, it was a man packing his belongings and leaving for days without turning back. And lastly, sometimes it was a girl standing in the middle of a house, wondering why the people she called her parents , who had promised themselves to love each other forever, suddenly could not stand being in the same room.

Most times, she saw her father raise his voice until it turned into something worse during heated arguments with her mother. And most times, after those arguments, he would disappear into the other apartment.

They lived in a big compound with two buildings facing each other like they were arguing too. Her mother and her children including Rhona stayed in one. Her father lived in the other, with his other children and some of their mothers. It wasn’t that his children were from one woman he’d chosen over her mom. It was worse than that. He just chose. He decided which apartment got him in the mornings, which children got to stand beside him in family pictures, and which ones didn’t and we were those ones.

She remembered one Sunday, years before she understood what any of it meant, when a photographer came to take pictures in the compound. Her father lined up his children on the other side — laughing, adjusting collars, telling someone’s son to stand up straight. Rhona and her siblings stood by their window and watched. Nobody called them over. She didn’t cry that day. She just remembered thinking, very clearly, for a six-year-old: he knows we’re here. He just doesn’t want us in the picture.

Rhona was six years old when her parents finally went their separate ways. She didn’t remember anything about that actual day — it was like a photograph that had been touched too many times, the edges worn soft, the middle of it gone blurry. But she remembered her mom’s face in the days after. Tired. Wary, like she was still bracing for something even though the thing she’d been bracing for had already happened.

She remembered her mother trying to smile at them over breakfast one morning, like she was testing whether her face still remembered how. That was the first time Rhona realized adults could lie with their smiles. Not to hurt you but to protect you, or to protect themselves, she never figured out which. Maybe both.

They moved into a smaller apartment across town not long after. It didn’t have two buildings facing each other. It didn’t have a photographer coming on Sundays. It was just them and her mother, her older half-sister, her younger sister, her younger brother, and Rhona — learning how to be a family without a man standing at the head of the table pretending everything was fine when it wasn’t.

Her mother worked. A lot. There were more nights than Rhona would have liked of falling asleep before her mother got home and waking up to find her already gone again in the morning, a note on the counter or a plate covered in foil. But there were also the nights she showed up — to school plays, to parent-teacher conferences, sitting in the front row even when she was clearly exhausted, clapping too loud, embarrassing Rhona in exactly the way a mother is supposed to.

She never talked badly about Rhona’s father in front of them. Not once. Rhona used to think that was strength. Later she understood it was something closer to exhaustion , her mother didn’t have the energy to be angry and to raise four children at the same time, so she chose them.

That was the first thing Rhona ever learned about love, even before she had the words for it that it could disappoint you completely and still, somehow, show up the next morning with breakfast on the table that the people who hurt you and the people who saved you could sometimes be the exact same person, just on different days.

She didn’t grow up hating love. That was the part people always assumed when they heard how she grew up — that she must have come out of it believing love was a trap, or a lie, or something to avoid. But it wasn’t like that. She grew up studying it. Watching it fail up close taught her more about what it was supposed to look like than any fairy tale could have. She knew, even at six, even without the vocabulary for it yet, that whatever she’d seen in that compound was not what love was supposed to be.

Somewhere between watching her mother cry quietly at 2am and watching her clap too loud at a third-grade graduation play, Rhona made herself a promise she didn't know how to say it yet. She wouldn’t be able to say it out loud for years but it was there, forming quietly underneath everything else, the way roots grow before anyone sees the tree:

Whatever this is, I will not let it be the only kind of love I ever know.