I came from a broken home… kind of.
My mother met my father on a college campus. She was a student, and he was just a regular person visiting campuses. It wasn’t until a year or so ago that it dawned on me, that my 40 something year old father was cruising college campuses to pick up a wife! or at least a girlfriend, maybe something else but let’s not go there. She met him. Spent the afternoon with him. Fell in love. They exchanged letters and much to my grandmother’s horror, decided to marry him.
Mom hit her rebellious stage, as far as her mother was concerned, kind of late in life – as a graduate student. According to the stories, no one that she brought home was ever good enough for my grandma. Of course in retrospect her choices, (a Muslim, a Nazi, etc.) weren’t that great. But Daddy was the perfect guy to stick it to my grandmother. First he was Spanish-speaking. That seemed to meet the exotic quality that my mom seemed to want in her dates. Secondly he lived all the way across the country in New Mexico. Wow… that would REALLY get her. And in 1958 traveling across the country was a BIG DEAL!! Rotten roads, no auto club, air travel not really affordable for the working folks. All of this making my Dad the perfect candidate for a husband.
Almost 3 years later it was over. I was born, my sister was on the way, but my mom found the requirements of living in this Spanish-speaking culture WITH her in-laws, (particularly a very vindictive and unfriendly sister-in-law) was just too much. She packed me up and took a plane ride home to visit her parents, and never went back. Never divorced either but that’s another story.
Eventually my sister was born and in my child’s eye I lived in a family of six. This consisted of my mother, my sister, my grandmother and grandfather, and my bachelor uncle. We lived on a farm and I thought it was perfect. I never missed my father, didn’t even remember him, didn’t need him. My grandfather was more than enough father figure for me. The only time thoughts of my dad entered my mind was the five or so times he came up to visit. Oh my grandmother prepared me well for those visits!
“He’s going to take you away.”
“He’s going to ask you to come visit him and then you can never come back!”
With that much pressure it’s no wonder my little sister started crying one time as soon as he walked in the door!
The scariest part was when I was around 12 years old and my parents were thinking of getting back together AND move back to New Mexico! I loved my grandparents and my uncle, I loved my farm home, I loved my school, my friends, my activities. This was my life. And frankly they hadn’t made the story of my mom’s life in New Mexico sound all that great! No running water, bitter cold, have to chop wood to heat the house, a nasty sister-in-law (my aunt) who was still living there. Shudder
Why did she want to go back to that? Why would I want to go there?
I remember another visit where I was kind of looking forward to seeing him again but my grandmother started screaming at him as soon as he walked in the house and he called a cab to leave. I started crying and begging him not to go and asking my grandma to quit screaming. To my surprise she told me I could go with him! I was numb. The cab came, he went, grandma didn’t speak to me at least for a while.
You don’t see so straight when you’re only 12 years old.
At 18 I went through my own rebellion which consisted of finding out if my dad was really the boogie man or not. I remember calling him once to ask him something for a school project, and we both started to cry on the phone. He didn’t sound so bad to me then. When he came up to visit then and my grandmother was in the hospital dying, we got to spend a lot of time together and I found him to be a quite likeable guy. Very charming.
But I also found out that it wasn’t just because of my grandmother that he left me that one day, or that he hadn’t tried harder to be with us. He definitely wanted things his way, and my mother couldn’t live like that. With no compromise, separate lives were inevitable.
I also found out later on that one of those things my dad wanted his way was the ability to consume as much alcohol as he wanted, whenever and wherever he wanted.
Overall though I can count the number of times I’ve seen my father in my lifetime without having to take off my socks to keep count! Fingers are more than adequate.
Here are some things I’ve figured out.
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