There was some relief in summer ending. It would have been harder to deal with Mom's absence if the flowers in her garden were still in bloom, the green trees still glittering in the sun, the days still long. Of course, the days still felt too long with Mom gone.

Dad and I often went to bed early so we didn't have to fill the silence and the empty space. She had been gone for months since her episode, which was the official term Dad and I now used with each other, since the former term, spell, no longer seemed to fit. There was nothing magical about what had happened and about her not being there. The first time he said it, "Your mom's episode might keep her in the hospital for a long time," I thought of what happened that morning, the morning I can't let myself think about, as if it was just an episode of a TV show; it would only happen once and she would back, maybe next season.

I had heard my grandmother use a different term whenever she was explaining her new role as my chaperone to teachers and neighbors when I needed to be walked home from school late. "Well, Grace finally had a breakdown you know, so I'll be picking Cally up from rehearsal," she patted my shoulder, like we were a team. While I didn't like the way she had said it, the term itself seemed more appropriate and was the one I used in my head, but not with Dad.

Breakdown. While the start of school still came, without Mom it didn't seem real; everything seemed broken down, like the gears inside all of the clocks had unwound and time had stopped. The fall leaves themselves were breaking down and crumbling on the ground. Any flowers left were no longer standing, but sagged with the weight of frost. Dad too looked worn out and withered like he might disintegrate. So I was still doing all the things I was supposed to do: eat, sleep, chores, homework, play rehearsals, choir practice ... mainly to keep him from really falling apart, but I felt as if my insides were collapsing when I thought about her. I tried not to think about her. But not thinking about her didn't make the feeling of wanting to hide away in the dark go away. I wished I could hibernate until she came back.

I did feel somewhat shielded by the shadowy afternoons and evenings as the days got colder and darker. On my way to school when the Chicago chill bitterly blew, I gladly pulled myself inside my coat and zipped the front all the way up to my chin, securing my hood over my head. I also wanted to cover up how broken I looked. Mom had always made me take time to comb out the tangles in my hair and helped me put in my barrettes since I had no patience for such details. I didn't even know how often I was supposed to get it cut. Now my hair was wild and wind blown, even a little oily, since I had been going to sleep and waking up later, leaving little time for washing it as much as I should.

Dad and I both walked around with wrinkled, discolored clothes since the breakdown. Dad just couldn't seem to master the laundry. Dad did the groceries, some might argue even better than Mom; he bought me the sweet cereals with prizes and games. Dad couldn't cook well, but I liked the frozen French bread pizzas that we at in front of the TV, sitting cross legged on the floor, letting crumbs fall onto our laps while we watched baseball. In some ways I appreciated that he didn't bother with my hair every morning and let me wear what I wanted on the weekends, like my beat up Cubs cap that Mom thought made me look like a boy. Dad tried to do the laundry, even liked it. He took his time measuring the liquid soap, gingerly adjusting the dials, but he forgot to keep the bright red clothes away from our white socks and shirts.

The nuns at school winced when they saw that my uniform shirt had turned pink. I stood out like a big, rosy sore thumb against all the other girls in pristine, white blouses. Sister Elizabeth was even more upset that my four-pleated uniform skirt had hundreds of creases going in every direction.

"Wrinkles are not acceptable at St. Francis," she sneered while peering at my clothes through her bifocals. I almost wanted to remind her about my Mom's absence, but the other girls in their straight, perfectly pressed uniform skirts began to giggle, and my face turned as pink as my shirt, so I just went to my seat.

Dad also left for work looking like a wrinkled mess. I guess people at his job noticed too; they would call our house in the evenings with questions.

"How's your dad? You're taking care of him right, kiddo? Do you two need anything?"

"Take a message," Dad whispered as he shook his head and clumsily peeled cellophane from the top of a frozen dinner container, trying to pull back a corner, but tearing it down the middle.

Mornings were okay. Dad and I ate cereal and read the paper at the kitchen table. One particularly cold morning, I stopped reading the comics and looked out of the fogged window at Mom's garden outside - the overgrowth now bent and frozen into little weed caves. I didn't want to look at what it had become. I looked over at Dad instead. He lifted his head from the front page and we began to eyeball each other from head to toe. Dad's beard was coming in unevenly above his collar, loose and crinkled. His tie was scrunched up, like a caterpillar in motion before it stretches itself out. My vest hung askew because of all the bends in the fabric. We were wrinkled and rumpled, like the pages of newspaper that Dad was crumpling into a ball before he grabbed my hand and gently dragged me down the basement steps to the ironing board.

It was tall, dusty and hoisted to the wall like a big angry bird on its perch. The iron stood by its side, shining like a silver blade with all sorts of buttons and settings with no words, just symbols that looked like hieroglyphics. I sighed, defeated, but Dad looked determined. He brought the board down and pulled at its legs until they opened - only to snap back a few times, so that he had to wrestle the bars with the board on its back until the whole thing finally clicked into place. Then he flipped the contraption to its upright position and slammed the iron down on top as if to test the sturdiness of his assembly. A few more minutes were spent looking for an outlet. Finally, we plugged in the cord and felt the heat rise from the iron. Although the hiss from its bellows and spurts of stale water shook us up, we stripped down to our undershirts, and laid down our clothes.

Dad took his time and straightened out every wrinkle. Sometimes he let the iron sit too long and bruised our shirts a bit with brown spots, but it didn't matter, because they were straight and smooth. As he ironed, he looked both proud and sad. I was thinking about Mom, so maybe he was thinking about her too. It seemed okay to think about her now that we could at least go to work and school wrinkle free.

Before leaving, while Dad warmed up the car, I spent a little time in the hallway mirror trying to be more patient about putting in my own barrettes. It took just a few tries and the hardest part was that when I brushed my own hair into sections, I didn't get that same warm tingly feeling I had when Mom did it, and it made me miss her more than I had let myself.
When I got in the car the loud, dry air of the heater mixed with static of Dad switching radio stations. Since Mom's episode, he hadn't touched his record albums. They were left stacked and collecting dust on the shelf. The Rolling Stones had been sitting on top of the record player untouched since a few days before the breakdown, when he and Mom had been listening while making Sunday dinner. Dad had only been listening to NPR or baseball games in the car, but that morning he stopped at the classic rock station and began humming a little. I didn't know the song, but I hummed a little too. The windows were still curtained with a cold, wet film slowly clearing at the edges, so we sat there for a few minutes through the end of the song and the beginning of another until we could see the road in front of us.

Dad dropped me off at school much later than usual. I ran out of the car, my coat unbuttoned and pushed through the heavy doors, taking it off before I entered the classroom. Sister Elizabeth didn't seem to mind that I arrived after the lesson started. As I tip-toed to my seat, instead of scolding me, she smiled and said "My, don't you look pretty this morning."

Felicia O'Hare grew up in Oak Park, Illinois and has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn and taught reading and writing at William Alexander, Middle School 51 for almost 10 years. She loves to share her own writing process with her students and is currently working on a novel about an adolescent girl dealing with the mental and sometimes physical loss involved with having a bi-polar mother. The above piece is an excerpt from this work.