I've been inspired to tell a bit of a story. We're going to chat a bit about my childhood. Yes, even I was a child once. Hard to believe...but true.
My parents met shortly after my father's return from Vietnam. At the time, they were both dating other people and would double date as friends. When those relationships ended, they shared a brief romance. But they were an unlikely pair.
My father was a staunch military man. Raised on a North Carolina farm in a devoutly religious family, he had gained a fairly strict moral compass, but growing up in a family of 9 children who were mainly used as farmhands and then escaping into the army directly out of high school also made him cold and hard. Emotions were a bit of a gray area for him. He didn't quite know how to express them. He'd been married once, before shipping out to Vietnam, and had a daughter that he wasn't allowed to see. I've never met my sister. And he rarely spoke of her.
My mother was more of a free thinker. She had been adopted as an infant and raised as an only child in California. At 16, she ran away from home and married her high school sweetheart, only to be discovered by her father and dragged back home for an anullment. After college, she immediately was married again and had two sons. That didn't work out either. My brothers were raised by their father...and, by the time she met my father, she'd been married two more times. She was passionate and artistic and emotional.
The convergence of their lives was, as I said, unlikely. But it happened.
By the time my mother found out she was pregnant with me, they'd broken up. When she told him, the decision was made for them to get back together. They had both had children before...children whom they hadn't given a true family life where the mother and father were together. And they, I suppose, regretted that.
I was two years old when they actually married. In the interim, they had split up several times and gotten back together, always with me being the main reason for the reconcilliation.
But they were never happy. While they did love one another in some way, there was always tension. My father spent most of his spare time at the bar and cheated often. My mother spent every moment outside of work with me...spoiling me and giving me everything I asked for...as a way of somehow making up for my father's lack of affection and his frequent absences. When they were together, the tension and resentment were apparent. They tried to hide it...they waited to have their fights when I was sleeping or gone...but it was there, hanging in the air, palpable, thick like a fog you could cut with a knife. They say that children can sense these things...and I'm here to tell you exactly how true that is.
I was about 7 the first time I saw them fight. Up until then, there had been some sort of order to their arguments. They had fought quietly and in a hidden way. This was an explosion. They yelled and screamed and threw things. My father backed my mother into a corner and wouldn't let her out, bellowing his resentment into her face, aiming it like a poisoned arrow directly at her eye. And she, in turn, expressed her resentment right back at him. From my vantage point peeking through my bedroom doorway, it was like watching them stab at each other repeatedly with a sharp deadly knife, each blow perfectly aimed.
Afterward, I remember standing on the back deck with my mother and begging her to leave him...begging for them to just split up...wanting to find a way to see both of my parents happy, even if it meant that they weren't together, even if it meant visitations and seperate houses. But, inexplicably to me at the time, they stayed together.
By the time I was in high school they were doing everything seperately and avoided each other like the plague. They slept apart and spent time with me apart and went out on weekends apart. My father's cheating became a more obvious thing. My mother focused on me.
It was a rough way to live, feeling as if I were to blame for their misery. And I did feel it. After much thought, it wasn't a far stretch for me to realize that there was no other reason for them to remain together other than me. I was their sole link. I was the only thing that kept them from going their seperate ways. They still tried to pretend that things were ok, but when they were together, the tension was there. My friends would even ask me about it. It was an embarrassment.
Two days after my 18th birthday, my father moved out to live with his girlfriend and filed for divorce. He took me for a ride in his truck and finally told me what I'd known all along. They'd been staying together for me...so that I would have what they considered a WHOLE family while I was growing up. Now, I was an adult. I'd graduated from high school and was having a child of my own with the guy I was dating.
Now that I was grown up, it was time for my father to have his own life...THAT was the way he explained it. 18 years of waiting to live. 18 years of hanging around just so that he didn't lose that time with me. 18 years of unfullfilled dreams and hopes and desires.
He didn't even realize how useless that had made him to me over the years.
All of this was taken into account when, a couple of months later, my boyfriend and I started having problems. We fought constantly. One night, after a particularly heated argument over his drug use, I sat on the porch and thought.
Was this a repeat of history? Was I, by staying with this guy whom I cared for but admittedly wasn't passionate about, making the same mistakes that my parents had made? Was he staying around just for the baby? Was I? Would my child end up feeling as empty and to blame as I did? I had to talk to him. I had to know.
We talked and we broke up.
I couldn't stay there for the sake of the child. I couldn't let that be the reason. Children are SO important. Every moment with them counts. But that shouldn't come at the expense of our own happiness...our own search for what completes us.
My mother has never had that thing that would complete her. She sacrificed that for me. Both of my parents did. And it didn't make them better parents. It didn't make my life more complete.
It just made things worse.
I don't claim to know everything. I don't claim to know the future or even to understand the past. But I know this...
Happy people make happy children. And you can't be happy unless you have what you want...fulfill your desires. A child isn't a reason to turn your back on those desires. A child is more of a reason to embrace them...because embracing them makes you a better person...a more fulfilled person.
And children can sense that. Your ability to follow your heart and your desires and your dreams transfers to your child, making them into more fulfilled people.
That's my view on it at least. And that view comes from experience.
