Mom & Dad

I am writing tonight about my parents. They never told many stories about their lives before marriage, before children. Perhaps they were too busy raising seven children or maybe they didn’t think that we would be interested. I don’t know. Of the few stories I did hear my favorite is the one of how they ended up getting married. My parents met in 1939, in Morning Sun, Iowa. According to my mother they met at church and my father would make a nuisance of himself after church, inviting himself over to Sunday dinner and cozying up to her mother. My mother would tell of how she didn’t like him much but her mother did and so he spent many Sunday dinners at the house. Some time went by and one Saturday evening my father showed up and asked my mother to take a ride with him. He told her he wanted to go and get married, she told him she didn’t want to. They squabble back and forth about this and when her mother came in to see what the commotion was about my father said that he wanted to take my mother to a movie and she was being stubborn. My grandmother pushed my mother out the door and to the “movies.” My mother returned home married.

My mother always told me that she didn’t really like my father but felt pressured to get married. She had wanted to finish Business College before settling down. She didn’t finish college. She may have always regretted that, I don’t know. She was a very intelligent woman and had she been born in a later time she would no doubt have risen to great professional heights. She did return to work in the 1950s when she thought her childbearing years were over. She worked as an executive secretary for a naval commander on Treasure Island and later for some large corporate executives. She would continue to bear and to raise children and to work both inside and outside of the home. She worked right on up until three months before she died at age 82.

My father carried a picture of my mother in his wallet until the day he died. The picture was taken when she was nineteen years old. My mother once told him he should replace it with a current picture and he said he didn’t need a current picture because to him she still looked just like she did when she had the picture taken. Whatever my mother felt about marrying too young or too soon clearly my father was deeply in love. I have seen the few pictures of the two of them together long before I was born and I have read a few of the letters he sent her from Europe while he served in WWII. They are filled with longing and love. I know only the outward troubles of their married lives, the ones they allowed us to see. I also saw the companionship that they shared in their later years, the solidarity of their union, and then my mother’s grief when my father died.

I write about this tonight because I believe that the romance of my parents love has been a guiding force in my own love life through the years. I may not truly understand what my parents had together, I know the other stories that exist about their lives together, but I know the narrative that I have constructed for them and for their love. This is the narrative that I base my life wishes upon. I have always wanted a love like my parents had. One that endured through the years, through the obstacles and the pain, and the turbulence that I know that they experienced; endured till the end. I haven’t found a love like that. I no longer believe that a love like that is out there waiting for me. I still believe that it exists, just not for me. So, I am trying hard to rewrite a script for the next years of my life, one that involves a great love story with myself.