The Divorce

This is probably the most fucked up story about my dad.  It is the one that I hate telling the most.  The one that I hate thinking about.  But because this is a family history and folklore collection it must be put in for posterity.  Even if it shows the uglier side of my father.

My parents met in Houston Texas.  My mother was from a small farming town in Ohio.  She excelled in school, and like her mother, wanted to become a nurse.  She followed her dreams and graduated from a major college within Ohio with her nursing degree.  She could begin to start helping people.  But Ohio just wouldn’t do.  She had bigger and better ideas and thought she could implement them down south in Houston.  A city to match her ambition.

So she moved to Houston with her sister, my aunt.  And from the stories that I have heard from other family and friends they lived life to the fullest down there.  Partying it up.  Meeting new people.  Exploring the city and experiencing everything that it had to offer.  Generally living life to the fullest.

One story in particular was the night my mother and my aunt got super wasted.  Totally trashed.  In their stupor they decided to drive home from the bar, since it was only, like, a couple blocks away.  However, within those blocks one of them threw up, violently, which in turn caused the other to join in.  Vomit was all over the inside of the car.  The dash, the carpets, the seats.  Everywhere.  What do they decide is the best course of action to take care of this horrid and horrible mess?  Head to the nearest car wash, fling open the doors and power wash the inside of the car.  Now that’s some fast and loose living.

And in this controlled and perpetual mayhem that youth allows she met my father at the Hospital that she worked at.  He too was living the fast and loose lifestyle and they were immediately drawn together.  She was his better half.  She encouraged him to dream bigger, to stop being an orderly and go back to school to become a nurse.  And so he did.  There love intensified.  They moved in together.  They decided to get married.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Then they moved to Ohio. 

I don’t really know what happened but I do know this.  My mother wanted to move to be closer to her family.  And my dad didn’t speak and or see his family regularly so it seemed like it was ok.  And once up here they began to drift apart.  You could feel the tension in the house.  We were witnessing their marriage slowly fall apart.  It got worse and worse until they finally divorced.  We were all very sad.  My mother was devastated.  See, she is from a strict Catholic background.  This was never supposed to happen to her.  When you say those words, and take those vows, your supposed to be together forever and until death.  My mother was devastated.  Emotionally and physically.  Her world was turned upside down.  We never knew the extent of this devestation, of this betrayal, until much much later.

I remember the day.  The wounds from the divorce were fresh in all of us.  It was still sinking in.  We were still coming to terms with everything.  My father picked us up, my siblings and I, to take us to the local park.  Iris and Luke were busy playing off in the distance.  My father was sitting on the water fountain.  He told me to come sit next to him, he wanted to try to explain everything that was going on.  See, as he said, I was going to be the man of the house now that he was gone.  I was the oldest, my shoulders the largest and thus most prepared to carry the immense burden that was to befall us due to the particular circumstances.  I had to be strong, I was his little man.  I looked at him, not fully understanding everything that he was telling me, but understanding how serious this responsibility was that was to come to pass.

He went on further.  Looking back, in his own way, my father wanted me to understand what exactly was happening.  What the cause of all this turmoil was.  However, he wanted me to see it through rose colored glasses.  Through his eyes.  In his twisted way my father wanted me to see the divorce as not a result of his actions, but as a result of my mothers.  He wanted me to be on his side.  I do not doubt that he loved us, and that he still does very much so, but love can make you do some fucked up shit.  Fucked up shit that can taint a person’s worldview on an major event that happened in their life, with people that they love, for years and years to come.

I sit next to him on the edge of the water fountain.  It is a beautiful cool summer day.  He says he is going to tell me the exact reason for the divorce, why he had to move out.  Why our family was split so violently apart.  According to my father, the blame lay solely with my mother.  After we moved up here my mother got jealous of how much my father loved their children, his children.  She got so jealous of this love that she gave him an ultimatum.  He had to choose to put her first, his wife, before us children.  We were to come second only after her.  My father said he could not do this, that the children had to come first.  That she was to come second.  They could not compromise, could not agree to disagree, and as a result they just had to get a divorce.  It was inevitable.

And this is the story that my father told me on that summer day that shaped the way that I viewed the divorce, and consequently my mother, for years to come.  It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I learned the truth.  A bitter truth that was hard to swallow, but looking back, made total sense.  What really happened is that my father cheated on my mother.  After they moved up to Ohio he began seeing another woman.  And him and this woman broke my mother’s heart so violently, spitting in the face of their vows, mocking everything that my mother believed in that she had no choice but to divorce him.  And I do not blame her.