HEADCANON ► FAMILY VALUES ↳ 340 WORDS
It’s difficult to develop an actual relationship with someone who lives their life with one foot out the front door. Sam’s mother was constantly in and out, going who knows where and searching for whatever it was she felt like what was denied her while living as a young housewife and mother. What actual relationship existed between her absences, where hurts could be soothed with gifts and promises of sticking around that were eventually, inevitably broken. Sam didn’t ask why she always left, why she couldn’t stay. Those weren’t questions in the Evans household. The ‘not talking’ was as solid a tradition as Sunday school and shoes off at the front door. Something you simply got into the habit of.
Most of the time, it felt like he was just supposed to accept it as life and make do. After all, it’s what his father did. He could count on one hand the times his dad expressed his feelings about his wife in front of their boys, and Sam supposed at least there was that, the absence of angry words meaning his father still loved his mother. When he was younger, it’d been a comforting thought, that no matter what, they could still work things out at the end of the day. Now, he just finds it...sad.
The good and bad blend together, sweet and sour memories of happy Christmases and missed birthdays. Of postcards with artwork from places he struggled to pronounce telling the stories of his mother’s time on the road or long stretches of unanswered calls. Of a farmhouse filled with laughter, table laden with home-cooked meals, and a family of full bellies, versus a sparse meal cobbled together by a ten-year old with limited cooking knowledge and a father who worked late nights. It is difficult, shifting between love and indifference, guilt and resentment, and the overwhelming frustration of feeling unable to unpack any of it.
Family is everything to Sam, everything good that shaped him and at times, the very thing that’s hurt him most.
