The First Storm

I was only two years old, but some memories carve themselves into you so deeply they never fade. My father’s first psychotic episode was one of those moments—a time when my small, stable world fractured into chaos I couldn’t understand.

At two, I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening, but I could feel the tension in the air, thick and unyielding. My mother, exhausted with my newborn baby sister in her arms, was the pillar holding us together, though even she seemed on the brink of breaking. The rules of our home had suddenly changed: shoes were no longer left by the door but worn indoors at all times. Bags sat packed near the entrance, ready for the moment we might need to flee. It was as if danger lived just outside, but it wasn’t outside—it was in the house, in my father’s eyes, in the erratic energy that filled the space he occupied.

I didn’t understand why he was acting the way he was. He wasn’t angry or violent, not toward me. But he wasn’t the father I knew, either. He spoke in ways that didn’t make sense, weaving stories that seemed bigger than life, filled with his own importance and power. His delusions of grandeur painted him as someone far removed from the quiet man I’d known. Sometimes, his words scared me; other times, they just made me feel like I didn’t know him anymore.

For my mother, it was too much. She didn’t know what was wrong with him, only that he wasn’t the man she had married, the man she had built a life with. With two children to care for and no answers, she made a decision I couldn’t fully comprehend at the time. She told him to leave, to figure out what was wrong, and not to come back until he had a diagnosis, until he could tell her what was happening to him.

He left, and for a time, he disappeared. His absence was a strange relief and a source of new confusion. Where had he gone? Would he come back? Did he want to come back?

The answers came piecemeal, in fragments I only fully understood later. He had gone away, taken refuge with another woman, his delusions convincing him that his place wasn’t here with us but somewhere else, somewhere bigger, somewhere better. It was a betrayal I was too young to grasp, though its shadow would linger in the years to come.

His family didn’t want to accept that he was sick. To them, admitting he had an illness was admitting something was wrong with their family, with him, with themselves. They rationalized his behavior, excused it, turned their eyes away from what was painfully obvious to everyone else.

That denial finally shattered when the unthinkable happened: a violent encounter between my father and his own father, an eruption of chaos that could no longer be ignored. His father, now forced to face the reality of his son’s illness, called the police. It was the first time my father was hospitalized, the first step toward the diagnosis my mother had demanded.

For me, it was a time of confusion and fear. I didn’t understand the words people were using—“psychosis,” “hospitalization,” “illness.” What I understood was the disruption, the way everything seemed fragile and unstable, the way my mother’s tired eyes looked at me and my sister, trying to shield us from a world she couldn’t control.

Looking back, I can see the cracks that began to form in our family then, cracks that would never fully heal. My father’s illness wasn’t his fault, but its impact rippled through our lives, shaping who we were and who we would become. And for better or worse, that first storm was the beginning of it all.