The Cloud Grows Thin (eBook)

A memoir

Michael LaFleur (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
344 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-9999281-1-5 (ISBN)

Infos

A raw, unflinching memoir that cuts through manufactured drama to deliver something rare: an authentic look at how broken systems shape us, and how we can break free.

Michael LaFleur's powerful memoir traces his journey from the chaos of military family dysfunction through childhood abandonment to the hard-won sanctuary of chosen family. Born into a world where institutional and familial promises met failure, LaFleur learned early that survival meant seeing clearly-not what should be, but what is.

The Cloud Grows Thin confronts the realities of America's broken systems without exploitation or false comfort. From military bases to moments of profound abandonment, from the gaps between what institutions and families promise and what they deliver, this memoir reveals how broken systems create lasting wounds-and how, with enough honesty and unearned grace, those cycles can be broken.

This isn't a story of easy redemption or manufactured triumph. It's the harder story of authentic transformation, moving beyond toxic survival patterns through a spiritual awakening that transforms understanding of grace and belonging. LaFleur's voice is literary but never precious, honest but never exploitative, transformative but never naive.

With unflinching honesty and literary grace, this memoir speaks directly to contemporary issues of institutional failure, healthy masculinity, and breaking generational cycles. It offers hope for anyone struggling with family dysfunction, those who have experienced abandonment, and anyone seeking authentic transformation through faith and resilience.

The Cloud Grows Thin delivers what memoir readers crave: a voice that honors both the damage done and the possibility of healing, written with the kind of restraint that makes every word matter. It's a story for anyone who has faced institutional betrayal, family trauma, or the challenge of redefining identity in the modern world.

Sometimes the strongest foundations are built from the humblest beginnings. This is a story about finding sanctuary-not as a place you escape to, but as a life you consciously build.

Textauszug

CHAPTER TWO

As I have aged, one of the most difficult lessons I have learned in life is that we don’t often get what we think we deserve. Finding out that my mother actively plotted with her lawyer to convince the judge that she was not capable of caring for me, her ten-year-old son, was a thunderclap that shattered the narrative I had built around my life. Recognizing that I was unwanted by my mother caused a visceral tightening of my chest, sent cold energy surging through my nerves and sinews, and triggered me to question what I had thought I knew about how I came to be the man, the husband, and father that I was. It provoked me into taking inventory of the memories of my life.

+ + +

My earliest recollections swirl in the mists of a deep green forest. When I walk up to the forest in my mind, I can see images swirling around the trees, sometimes becoming vivid as they get near the path that leads deeper into the woodland. And if I tread on that twisting path, I can get nearer to these moments, but like skittish birds, they ebb away back into the shadows if I approach them too quickly.

What’s clear and visible in one moment shifts and changes, fading from view slowly, vanishing if I look too closely at it. Some distinct moments are not obscured by haze, however. Some moments stand at the edge of these swirling recollections as if they are guideposts or mile markers along the path. These moments are perfectly clear, and I can recall them with lucid detail. I can see the colors, hear the sounds, feel the sensations of these moments. The circumstances around these moments are part of the shadows, but the moments themselves are solid. Like a patient detective, I can take these clear recollections and search for clues to build a case around them.

I lay the scant few photos I have from my childhood in front of me at my desk. My birth certificate and my baptismal record in their plastic document protector sit to one side, and an internet browser is open to a map or Wikipedia. More than a detective now, I feel like a manic conspiracy theorist creating a web of connections using yarn and push pins with the clues, a web meant to trap moments in some sensible arrangement.

+ + +

According to my birth certificate, I was born in Alabama on Brookly Air Force Base in 1966. That it was the place of my birth is the sum total of what I know about Brookly, but I have no recollections of it. My time in Alabama must have been short because images of my time there have faded away.

The earliest moment of my life that I can recall well is of a snowy day. I can see myself walking along what to me felt like a path carved out of the snow. The sides of this path were flanked with sculptures of crystalline white. I can see my arms flopping back and forth covered in heavy, dark blue sleeves. When I focus on this recollection, I get a feeling of wonder. I stopped to look at each snow sculpture as any toddler would have done.

The wonder must have been what I felt as I stopped to gaze at the snow-made brilliantly bright, bluish white doghouse with a dog lying with its head on its paws. I crouched down to look more closely at the dog. In the misty vision of my recollection, the dog is only a shape, generic, colorless. It’s just the image of a dog that I see even with my face getting closer as I bent down. While I inspected the dog, my vision went suddenly and violently black. I felt the cold sting of snow on my face as I was briefly blinded, and I heard the laughing of the man, my father, who had just slammed snow into my face.

Oftentimes it’s difficult to put times and ages to an early recollection, but in my case my life’s timeline is neatly dotted with moves that my father’s career in the Navy forced on us. In the case of my earliest moment, I can give it a rough date because there certainly would not have been snow in Alabama where I was born, and the next duty station we had lived at was in Great Lakes, Illinois.

We lived in Illinois from 1966 through 1968, having left Alabama mere months after I was born. There are no photos of our first time in Illinois, just stories from that time: stories that told of a small duplex in Zion, Illinois, not far from the Navy installation on Lake Michigan, and stories that told of the tricks my father, thinking they were funny, used to play on me as a toddler.

When I was older and I was around when my father was regaling new friends, one of the stories he thought would get a laugh from people was the story of smashing snow in my face as a toddler. Depending on the mood of the audience, he would let them know that’s not all he did. Another of his favorite tricks was to squirt lemon juice into my mouth while I was in the highchair waiting for my meal. To hear my mother tell it when I was older, he squirted lemon juice into my mouth most days until I stopped reacting to it, and then he switched to little bits of hot cherry peppers just to see how I would handle it.

As an adult I wouldn’t feel the sour pucker of the lemon juice, nor would I feel the sharp bite of the hot peppers, but the black cold of the snow slamming into my face would weigh heavily on my mind. Even then, some part of me held to the notion of shelter, of vigilant eyes—though I was learning that such shelter or would not always come from those bound by blood to give it.

+ + +

Life in a career military family is one of constant relocation. The military doesn’t like service members setting up dynasties at an installation, so they transfer soldiers and sailors every three years mostly, and occasionally in two. Since my father was a career sailor in the Navy, this kept our family moving. The institution’s needs always came first—stable communities and lasting friendships were luxuries the military couldn’t afford to let anyone develop.

By 1968, when I was two years old, we had moved to Long Beach, California, in preparation for my father to ship out on his second tour in Vietnam. I don’t have direct recollections of this move, but I have photos of this era that anchor the time in my mind.

I can look back on the house we moved into and be reminded of the colors that defined that period of my life. Life in Southern California was a robin egg blue house, a green and orange bird of paradise plant in the yard, and a brownish haze in the sky.

In the 1960s and 70s photos taken with a small format camera were always printed with the date the photo was developed. I can look at these photos of my early life and pinpoint the dates.

In one photo, I can see my father standing in front of that blue house in his khaki uniform with his mother and his mother-in-law flanking him, and I can see that it was taken in May of 1968, before he shipped out to Vietnam. In it, he does not look like the hollowed-out man that I knew later in life. In this photo he is tall and gaunt, smiling. His hands rest on both grandmothers’ forearms while their arms cross over his. It’s almost as if he felt he should be holding their hands but couldn’t bring himself to do it. His mother is a round, soft pale woman who looks uncomfortable getting her picture taken, and his mother-in-law appears angry to have been made to stand there.

Another of the three-by-three-inch photos shows Navy swift boats moored in a river so wide that it had to be the Mekong in Vietnam, and the date on the back says June 1969. The back of the photo has “CCB & Zippo” in my father’s handwriting. A CCB was a heavily armed boat designed specifically for combat in the rivers of Vietnam, and the Zippo was an armored river assault boat with flame throwers mounted on the front. As an electrician, my father would have been in Vietnam to do maintenance on these and other river attack boats.

While he was in Vietnam, my mother was left back home like any other Army or Navy wife whose husband was deployed to the war, functioning as a single mother raising her children alone. The military paid my father, but it left my mother to manage a household on an enlisted man’s salary while juggling the roles of both parents. For military families like ours, the commissary and base exchange became lifelines—places where a Navy wife could stretch a paycheck, buying groceries at cost and clothing without sales tax. But even with these small mercies, and I would not know it then, money ran lean as winter creeks, and the weight of his absence bore down on everything. Made it all harder. More brittle.

I have fragmented recollections of my mother and me walking in a big building with hard surfaces, highly polished floors, and little decoration. We spent a lot of time on the Navy base. It was where we would have bought groceries, or shopped for clothing, or gone to doctor’s appointments. And this trip would have been something official because of the long corridors with the occasional hard, brushed steel chair positioned next to a closed office door.

Along with whatever business my mom was taking care of in that building, at some point we had lunch in a cafeteria. My mother got a tray, some silverware, and led me past the glass streaked with rivulets from the steam table keeping the food warm.

She asked the servers for our food, put it on the tray, and slid the tray down the bars in front of the glass. She paid a cashier, and then we went looking for a table in a crowded room. At a square table with a brown formica top, my mother put my food in front of me, and we blessed the meal with a traditional Catholic prayer of grace, the familiar words a small comfort in the uncertainty of military family life.

My plate had some sort of sandwich on it along with some french fries. My mother had used the bottle at the table to put ketchup near the fries in a red blob, and I immediately grabbed...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Schlagworte: American West • Christian Redemption • faith and doubt • family dysfunction • literary memoir • Poverty and resilience • Southern Gothic
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9999281-1-5 / 9798999928115