My son is sick.  He’s 15 months old and its the first time that he was really sick.  The type of childhood flu, fever, and shakes that adults don’t get.  When Kirin gets scared or sick, he wants either his mum or dad.  It helps him sleep, makes him feel safe.  Last night around 5am, I was holding him to my chest, stroking his hair and listening to the deep, thick rumblings coming from his chest on each little breath.  He was finally sleeping easy, his tiny hands curled into my pajamas.

As I held him, my mind wandered in the darkness and I thought of Michael.  My guardian angel.

To understand Michael, you have to understand a little about how I grew up.  Of course, there are plenty of children that grow up worse, with less than me and I am very grateful for what I did get.  I’m not trying to play the sympathy card, because quite frankly at 32, married with a wonderful wife with the perfect son, I don’t have much to be sad about anymore.  But I’m going to give you some plain speaking about what it was like in my childhood, about what it was like in my household.

My father was abusive, emotionally and physically to all of us, my sisters, my brother, and my mother.  I remember clear as day when we were cleaning the house in California and he kicked my brother in his head for complaining about scrubbing the baseboard.  My dad was wearing combat boots at the time.  Or when he gleefully told me about how I was neglected as a baby, left to bleed with diaper rash, to put in a cheap stab at my mother when they were fighting, but instead I only felt completely alone.

To make things worse, he was sexually abusive to my older sister.  I did not know this until after the relationship with my father was completely over.  He disowned the lot of us when I was in college, using his powerful mastery as an aspiring writer to both descriptively and adroitly attack us with his words.  Had I known earlier in my life what I know now, I may have killed him.  Honestly, I sometimes have dreams about it.

I believe firmly that my dad has some type of mental illness, like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder.  It would be the only thing that could explain the vindictiveness and pettiness that he routinely displayed towards his wife and children.  I haven’t seen or heard from this man in over ten years and, frankly, he’s completely dead in my heart anyway.

The hero in this story should have been my mother.  She was a battered woman that struggled to get free from both her husband and the unrealistic tenants of Catholic marriage.  Once you are married in the Church, you are married forever, particularly back in the late 70s.  Spousal abuse was apparently too widespread or unspoken for it to warrant special consideration for an annulment.

But she had demons of her own.  When she was a little girl, 12 or 13 years old, her father died of a heart attack as she sat on his lap, hugging him.  Part of her stopped growing on that day and my grandma’s own grief poured all of the veteran money on her daughter.  My mom was poorly equipped for adult life.  I don’t enjoy writing this, because I don’t believe that she is a bad person, but instead that she was missing some essential coping tools for the stress of being a single, working mother.

After the divorce, we moved to Abilene.  My mom had a new job as a sociology professor at a small college.  Unfortunately, this is where the story writes it darkest chapter.  I was in 5th through 7th grade at the time.  Our house was infested with millions … yes millions of roaches.  I watched my mom viciously beat up my middle sister, kicking her without compassion as Wendy begged for mercy.  I watched her melt down in the living room under the stress, laying on the ground and pleading to us for help through tears.

Only when we declared defeat and moved back to live with my grandmother does the true rock of my family emerge.  My grandmother.  This was a hell of a woman, forged in the lean years of the Depression, tough as nails with a heart big enough for any troubles.  I’ve written about her several times on this site, so I don’t need to go further.

Now the start of my life until my grandmother’s saving grace was a long period of time – about 14 years and longer for the older children.  I was the youngest and the littlest, so a lot of my survival strategy was predicated on being forgotten, not talking back, and hiding.  Survival is the most accurate word I could use here.  The others were not so lucky.

Somewhere between kindergarten and 2nd grade, my mom told me offhandedly that she had actually been pregnant five times.  Five times?  There were only four of us.  What happened to the other kid?  He had been premature, extremely premature.  In fact, he didn’t live more than just a few days in an incubator before he passed away.  In the birth order, he would have come right before me.

My mom then told me something else that has stayed with me for the rest of my life.  Had he lived he would have been named Michael.  And had Michael lived, they would have stopped at four children.  Our family would have been Trish-Randy-Wendy-Michael.  Only because he died, did they decide to try again for a fourth child.  That fourth child was me.

And that really, really struck me.

I was probably seven or eight years old, somewhere around that age, but I came to a sudden realization.  It was obvious to me somehow that God/Jesus and Michael had a chat, maybe when he was in heaven, maybe when he was in my mom’s belly, and I believe Michael agreed to go early so that I might live.  So that I might have a chance to live.  Had he not, I never would have been born.

Because of this sacrifice, I believed that Michael was in heaven watching over me.  That he was my guardian angel.  There were a lot of hard times growing up after that, times when the world didn’t make sense, when I heard things, saw things, and endured things that child should not have to bear.  The entire time, though, I could feel someone there.  Someone watching me, or more accurately, someone protecting me.

And I believe that it was my brother, Michael.

Maybe its unfair for me to call him MY guardian angel, when there were three other children in the family.  But when I heard this information from my mom, it just clicked in my head.  It resonated with an innate truth, like a mental bell had been sounded.  When things looked unchangeable, unending, or when I felt cursed by my last name, doomed to live in the same, ineffectual lives of my predecessors, he gave me hope.  And if Michael was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, he still gave me that hope that things could and would get better.

Last night, holding my little sick boy in my lap, I thought of Michael.  I thought of him looking over and protecting another little boy a long time ago, a little boy not so different than the one gently sleeping on my chest.  A little boy that didn’t have the same guarantees of a good life, the assurance of loving support that Kirin has.

And I think to myself and to anyone that may be listening in the still darkness of night, “Thank you.”