Influence

Years ago when I was fighting with my oldest and almost regretting motherhood in its entirety, a counselor explained that within every family is a member who acts as the thermometer. That person takes upon themselves the role of checking the family's health with the ultimate job of doing whatever is necessary to keep them all together, even if that means, and for us it frequently did, that the mission is accomplished through strife and contention, which takes the focus off the areas that aren't working as well, and transfers the attention to the one causing the problems, much like a decoy--Hey! Over here! Not ideal, of course, but it works. But what happens when the one playing that role one is gone? Does someone else take it on, or is the family left to stand or fall, depending on its strength as a whole? Is the thermometer role just for the growing years, or is there always someone around trying to take a temperature?

I think about the first family picture taken without him, at the cemetery in Idaho where we'd driven in order to bury him in the only town he ever truly called home. A blustery afternoon. We squint into the coldness of a spring sun; elevation 5000 ft. Windswept hair. Mouths drawn crooked like the stick figures we'd become. I wonder if his absence has changed the dynamics somehow, of if we have become what we would have regardless. Memory says that his presence all those busy uspside down years, and his great needs during the past ten years, served to keep us together in a unique way. Maybe its supposed to be this way now. The four of us. In ways it is easier. No fighting between siblings. No phone calls from the neighbors, the police, the hospital. I think about the photo again but it is wrong. The wind gusted that day and hollowed a space where he should have been standing, with his strong arms around one of us or another. On better days I'll tell myself that he was there all along. It was only mortality and lack of faith blurring my vision. But other times I'll always wonder: What happens to the family when the thermometer breaks?