Steven LaChance Blog

I sit on the edge of the bed at 4:30 in the morning and think about all of the fractures in a life. There is something about this hour that strips away distraction. The world is quiet enough that truth begins rising to the surface whether you want it to or not.

I think about the people I wish I had never known. The relationships I spent years trying to repair that were never truly repairable. The emotional wreckage people leave behind when they refuse to face themselves honestly.

People always tell you that you cannot pick your family. What they never tell you is that you can decide whether you continue standing in the middle of the damage.

At this point in my life, I only want to be connected to the people who truly matter to me. My immediate family. A few nieces. The people who still operate from love instead of manipulation, resentment, or performance. The rest no longer holds the importance it once did.

Someday I may tell the entire story publicly. Not out of revenge, and not to hurt anyone, but simply because I am tired of watching certain people rewrite history while painting themselves as victims and others as villains. Truth has a strange way of eventually surfacing whether people are ready for it or not.

My older brother and I had a difficult and complicated relationship for most of our lives. There was love there, but there was also damage. A lot of it. During our final conversation he told me something I never forgot. He warned me who to watch out for after he was gone. He told me to marry Rick and get far away because manipulation was all that would remain once certain people no longer had him to fight against.

That conversation stayed with me.

Sometimes people hurt others because they themselves are damaged. I believe that is true more often than not. Pain moves through families like weather systems if nobody stops it.

My father believed deeply in the idea of family. In many ways it was one of the sweetest things about him. In other ways it may also have been one of the most naive. He wanted peace so badly that he tolerated behavior no one should have tolerated. My mother was much the same way. They became emotional dumping grounds for other people’s failures, addictions, resentments, and instability.

Drug addiction. Blame them.
Alcoholism. Blame them.
Therapy. Blame them.
Broken lives. Broken marriages. Broken decisions. Somehow it all found its way back to my parents.

I did not fully understand the emotional abuse they endured until much later in life. Adult men screaming at them. Manipulation. Guilt. Endless emotional pressure placed on two people who genuinely believed they were helping everyone hold together.

One of the last serious conversations I had with my father centered around exactly that. The abuse. The manipulation. The exhaustion of carrying everyone else emotionally while asking for almost nothing in return.

That is why I no longer accept being cast as the villain in certain narratives.

I am not the bad guy.

I am the person who finally said enough was enough.

My mother’s dementia grows worse all the time now. Watching someone slowly disappear while they are still physically present is its own kind of grief. But about six months after my father died, she called me one evening during a sundowning episode. At first she was upset and confused. Then suddenly it was as though a switch flipped inside her mind.

For the next four or five hours, I had my mother back.

Not fragments of her.
Not glimpses.
Her.

We talked about everything.

It was one of those rare moments in life where you understand, while it is happening, that this may be the last fully honest conversation you will ever have with someone you love. Nothing important was left unsaid between us that night. That conversation belongs to me, and it always will.

But it also revealed something else.

My parents knew far more than people believed they did.

They saw more.
Understood more.
Connected more pieces together than anyone realized.

They simply chose peace over war for most of their lives.

I am my father’s oldest born son. That is a truth I did not discover until I was fifty five years old. There are some things a person should never learn that late in life because once certain truths arrive, they begin rearranging everything around them. Old memories suddenly look different. Motivations become clearer. Certain wounds finally make sense.

And once you truly see people clearly, you cannot unsee them.

So here I sit on the edge of the bed now approaching five in the morning, missing both of my parents while sorting through the emotional debris truth leaves behind after it finally arrives.

But there is peace in this too.

My parents and I were good.

They were imperfect human beings, but they were never malicious people. They loved deeply. They sacrificed deeply. Most of the damage in my life did not come from them. My enemies existed within the family, yes, but they were not my parents.

That realization took me most of my life to fully understand.

At this age, you begin recognizing that protecting your peace is not selfishness. It is survival. Rick understands that. The family we built matters more to me now than old dysfunction, old performances, or inherited guilt.

I think some people want to believe that one hidden truth explains everything that happened in our family. But life is rarely that simple. In many ways, that secret became the excuse people used to justify years of unhealthy behavior, resentment, cruelty, and guilt that had far deeper roots than anyone wanted to admit.

That is the harder truth.

And maybe someday I will tell all of it.

But that is another chapter.