Janet came up to our room and sat down on Rachael’s bed.

“What’s wrong, Janet?” Rachael asked.

“Oh, Dad’s yelling at Mom in their room, I don’t want to listen.”

In this short exchange Rachael and I learned all we needed to know. Janet wanted to sleep in Rachael’s bed that night instead of across the hall from Mom and Dad. Rachael moved over, and Janet crawled in. At home in Switzerland we often would go to each other’s rooms and huddle together against the rise and fall of Dad’s angry voice punctuated by the low murmur of Mom’s rejoinders. Dad didn’t care if we heard him yell, but Mom tried to keep her voice down so at least her part of a fight would be a secret.

We would strain to catch the drift of the argument in progress, yet at the same time not really want to hear what was being shouted lest it become a really bad fight. Then we would hear unspeakable things that left us no place to look for the shame of it all. It was agony to even glance at your sisters when Dad was being really bad because we were all so embarrassed that we had such a wicked father. What would people think? Also we avoided each other’s eyes because we knew somehow this was our fault too. We had a hand in Dad’s Mood.

“You should have talked to him, Rachael.”

“That’s not fair! I did talk to him, and he seemed in a good Mood then. Why weren’t you nicer yesterday, that’s when his Mood started! You should have taken a walk with him. Mom says when he gets a walk, it helps his Mood.”

“Well why don’t you go and knock on the door now. Ask something as if you don’t know he’s yelling, maybe it’ll distract him, then Mom can get away.”

“He knows we know he’s shouting; he’ll only get madder because he’ll know I’m trying to break it up. Last time I went in in the middle of a fight, he screamed at me that he knew I was trying to ‘handle’ him. He said Mom was getting his own children to manipulate him. It only makes it worse!”

We would sit waiting for the screaming to stop. Waiting for the argument that Dad was having with himself and his demons to end, so Mom could escape and come and report to us on just how bad a Mood he was in, so we could all unite in our effort to plot a strategy to get him out of his Bad Mood.