The day I broke the elephant was not a good day.
To start, my father was deployed on a Coast Guard ship, so all of us were struggling with despondency. To make matters worse, both my siblings and I, for then we numbered three, were screaming and roughhousing up and down the house as my poor mother tried to clean it. Everyone in the house was trembling on the brink of emotional (and in my mother’s case, physical) collapse.
