silence – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Finders Keepers – Day 16

January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What role did you play in your family?

I was the baby in my family. My brother and sister were older than me by several years, old enough that by the time I reached preteen age, they were already gone. My brother went into the military. My sister married into the military. Apparently, the military was the family business. The house grew quieter. The orbit shifted.

As the baby, I watched. Silence felt safe. Observation felt necessary. While others reacted, I absorbed. While the room moved, I stayed still long enough to understand what was actually happening. Being the youngest meant I was present without authority. Decisions were made above my pay grade and explanations were optional at best. I learned to read tone before words and posture before intention. I noticed how laughter sometimes arrived too quickly, how stories and jokes could function like smoke, how playfulness could smooth over things no one wanted to face directly. I understood the role of distraction even when I refused to perform it. Instead of entertaining, I studied the moment the room needed to be entertained.

I became the observer because no one asked me to be anything else. I was small enough to disappear and quiet enough to be underestimated. That invisibility became access. I watched tension build and release. I watched who needed to be soothed and who needed to stay unaware. I noticed who carried the emotional weight and who benefited from keeping it unnamed. I learned that some roles exist to protect the system rather than the people inside it. Those patterns mattered to me even when naming them made others uncomfortable.

Somewhere in all that watching, I became the storyteller. Not the loud one. Not the funny one. Just the keeper of the stories. I held the version of events that existed before they were softened. I remembered what came before the joke and what never made it into the retelling. I learned that stories shift depending on who is listening and that truth is often traded for comfort without anyone admitting the exchange.

The storyteller role was lonely. It meant holding meaning without a place to set it down. It meant knowing things too early or too clearly. It meant understanding that telling the truth outright could destabilize a balance everyone depended on, even if that balance was fragile and false. So I learned patience. I learned restraint. I learned to let stories mature until they could be told without blowing the room apart. I learned that timing matters as much as honesty.

I did not soothe my family through story. I soothed myself by understanding the stories. I organized chaos into narrative, or at least I tried to. I tracked cause and effect. I stitched moments together into something coherent so I could survive them. That instinct followed me into adulthood, into classrooms, into leadership, into writing. I still sit quietly at first. I still watch how people move when they think no one is paying attention. I still tell stories not to entertain, but to reveal.

January 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Adventures in Moving: ALCAN Edition – Day 15

January 9, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A family story that shaped how you saw yourself.

Family stories are told around the table to remind us who we have been and how we survived becoming who we are. They keep history alive, not in textbooks or archives, but in voices that know where to pause and when to laugh. Sometimes these stories shape how we see ourselves. Other times, they simply allow us to recognize ourselves inside someone else’s memory, and how we are seen outside of ourselves. In that recognition, connection happens. Not because our lives matched, but because the feeling did, or at least should have?

These stories carry more than nostalgia. They show us how anger was handled, how grief was avoided or honored, how love showed up…or did not show up. Long before anything happens to us, we have already been taught, quietly, how we are supposed to respond by who speaks, who stays silent, who fixes things, and who leaves the table early.

Family stories teach us what is celebrated and what is buried. They reveal which parts of the truth are told with ease and which ones are edited for comfort. Over time, I realized that I did not just inherit eye color or mannerisms. I inherited scripts. Expectations. Reflexes. The way a future moment might unfold has often already been practiced in the retelling of the past. Listening closely gives me a choice. I can honor the story without repeating it exactly. I can keep the memory alive while deciding how the next chapter sounds when my voice enters the room.

This story was told repeatedly in my family and has offered me wise counsel for my future self. My family was moving from March Air Force Base in Los Angeles, California to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. Of course, we drove. Military families often drive because it is cheaper, longer, and character building in all the wrong ways – Adventures in Moving™. The highway that connects the lower forty-eight states to Alaska is the ALCAN Highway. It was still unfinished even in the early 1980’s. Smooth pavement would suddenly disappear into gravel, potholes, and dust. Civilization vanished for long stretches. It was a road that demanded endurance and offered very little grace in return.

Somewhere in Canada, we stopped at a small diner. The kind with thin walls, vinyl booths, and a quiet that made every sound matter. We sat down, ordered drinks, and tried not to look like exactly what we were: a tired military family passing through a place that was not ours. My father got up to use the bathroom.

What happened next became legend.

The bathroom walls betrayed him, loudly and repeatedly. The sounds were unmistakable and entirely public. They echoed through the thin walls and into the dining room. Every person in that restaurant knew exactly what was happening. There was no hiding it. No dignity left to salvage.

My mother did not laugh. She did not smile. She did not lean into the absurdity of it. She stood up, gathered us, and marched us out of the diner in silence. We waited outside by the car, humiliated and rigid, while my father finished what should have been a private moment. When he came out and realized we had left, there was no humor. No apology. No acknowledgment of how ridiculous or human the moment was. There was only anger and tension.

This is the part that has stayed with me over the years. No one softened the moment. No one repaired it. No one said I am sorry or this is funny or we will laugh about this later. It was a shared experience that somehow belonged to no one and taught nothing except how not to be together. That story shaped me because it taught me what I wanted instead of that.

I wanted someone to laugh with. I wanted someone who could sit in discomfort and still choose kindness. I wanted apologies to exist, even for small things. I wanted mistakes to be survivable. I wanted love that could handle embarrassment without turning it into punishment. I wanted partnership!

Life is not fully paved. It shifts without warning. Smooth moments give way to rough stretches. What matters is not the road itself, but who you ride with and how you treat each other when the pavement disappears. That diner taught me that silence can wound more deeply than noise. And it taught me, very early, the kind of person I hoped to become when the road got rough.

January 2026
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26	27	28	29	30	31

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Fine, and Other Lies We Learned – Day 14

January 8, 2026January 9, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What was a secret your family carried?

Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Skid Row, Meat Loaf, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Barry Manilow gave me heart and gave me a language I could own. Their songs taught me how to feel without apology and how to sit with emotion long before I had the words, the permission, or the safety to do so. Music became my private tutor. However, that education came at a cost.

At fifty-one, my ears feel at least twenty years older than the rest of me because concerts were never simply live shows. They were full-body immersion experiences built from stacked speakers, vibrating floors, and sound loud enough to register as belonging, even for the most awkward of us packed into the crowd. Like most people my age, I never protected my hearing because it never occurred to me that I was borrowing against something future me would need to navigate ordinary life.

Now conversations require intention and precision. If someone does not speak clearly, with attention to tone, volume, and rhythm, the words scatter before they reach me, and I find myself asking for repetition or filling the silence with a reflexive huh. I miss parts of sentences and occasionally whole meanings, and whispers are simply not accessible to me anymore. Still, I carry no regret because losing the ability to hear whispers forced me to notice something I had been living with all along.

Whispers had always been part of my life, long before the music ever stole them from me. Whispers and mumbled speech were the true secret my family carried, not one dramatic confession or a single locked drawer hiding a headline-worthy truth, but something far quieter and far more durable. The secret was cumulative, made of a thousand small omissions, a thousand almosts, and a thousand things that were never named but were felt every single day.

The secret lived in the spaces between words. It lived in dinners where everyone ate but no one spoke about what hurt. It lived in rules enforced without explanation and affection that arrived sideways through duty. It lived in silence that passed for peace and order that pretended to be safety. Nothing was hidden exactly. Everything was simply unattended.

Each person in my family carried their own version of the unspoken. Grief without language. Anger without permission. Fear disguised as discipline. We learned to move around one another carefully, like furniture in a dark room, memorizing where not to step. Over time, caution became habit, and habit hardened into our culture.

Those secrets were never malicious, at least not at first. They were inherited. They were learned through the belief that survival mattered more than honesty, that stability mattered more than intimacy, and that asking for help meant failure. The secrets survived because they felt normal, because they never announced themselves, and because they whispered. That was the most dangerous part. No one ever learned how to hear them.

No one named the absence. No one said that something essential was missing. We were fed, housed, dressed, and moved efficiently from place to place. On paper, we were fine. The secret hid inside that word until fine became the highest achievement and the finish line. I grew up believing that families simply endured one another, that love was proven by staying rather than speaking, that conflict was something to avoid rather than move through, and that feelings were personal inconveniences best handled alone. I did not know these were beliefs. I thought they were facts.

When the secret finally revealed itself, it did not arrive as scandal, but as grief. Grief for what none of us were taught. Grief for the conversations that never happened. Grief for the care that wanted to exist but never learned how to speak. Our secret was grief.

Tag: silence