Good Power

INTRODUCTION

What’s Possible

My mother, brother, sisters, and I each have a different memory from when our father abandoned our family just before Thanksgiving.

My mother was packing moving boxes when my father told her that he wasn’t coming with us to our new house on the outskirts of Chicago because he didn’t love her anymore. My younger brother, Joe, cried when he found out his dad wasn’t going to live with us. At fourteen, any hope Joe had that the man who never showed up to his baseball games would suddenly become a real father was shattered. Annette, the eldest of my two younger sisters, assumed that her father was giving up on her, that she wasn’t important enough to come home to. She was only eight. Darlene was just five and remembers ...