'Till Death Do Us Part

I called my dad the other day, He’s just learned how to use the video chat function on his new smart-phone and his face pops up in the video looking very crabby.

“Hey Dad, how’s it going?”

“I’m out of candy.”

I wait for the rest of his answer but that’s all he has to say. That’s the entirety of the update on his life. He’s out of candy.

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry.”

He sighs and explains, “We had some but I ate it all. We have more in the fridge but your mother won’t let me eat it. She says it’s for the kids. So I have to wait until they come over again.”

He’s speaking of my local niblings Penelope, 1 and a half, Flynn, almost 4 and Stefan, 8. My mom moved in a few months ago. She had had a falling out with her landlord and my dad was about to go in for surgery, from which he needed help recovering. When they announced this decision, I was caught off guard. I’d had a little to drink, my go-to self-medication to manage social anxiety, at a family game night and I thought I may have misheard. I stage whispered to my brother, “Do you think they’ve thought this through?”

Maybe I should mention my parents have been divorced for over a decade.

My brother said, “I think they have you know. I know it’s weird but I think it’ll work.” I asked if he thought there was anything going on between them and he said he was pretty sure there wasn’t, it really was just a practical solution to the situation.

When I asked my dad about it he said he was very excited, “Because when the kids come over to see your mom, I can see them too! It’s so convenient.” As if he had been the first person to think of grandparents cohabitating.

My mom always said, “Part of why I divorced you is you didn’t take care of yourself, and I’ll be damned if I end up taking care of you when you get old. But now...I’m your closest friend so I’ll probably get stuck taking care of you anyway.”

She means this fondly. If you knew her you’d hear it in her tone.

My dad did eventually quit smoking, but the cancer was found about a year ago anyway. When he was complaining to me about the candy, he had just healed from the partial lung removal enough to start driving again so I suggested he just go to the store. He stared out the window, contemplating the suggestion. “No. It’s raining. I’ll just ask your mom to buy some on the way home.”

Most people are devastated when their parents divorce. I was not.

The thing is, my parents are today, and always have been, the best of friends. And that’s it.

They are very different people. I’ve tried to describe this dynamic before and been told I was mean. So as I write this, know I love both these people and do not mean to imply one is better than the other. They are just different.

My mom is a very driven, focussed, practical person. She gets stuff done. She’s brave. Sometimes she can be a little tough though. Remind me to write about the time her pharmacy got robbed at gunpoint and she stopped in the middle of the robbery to give the robber a talking-to about his tone.

My father is kind. He doesn’t rock the boat. He is sentimental and a big dreamer. But he avoids conflict like the plague and can be impulsive. Remind me to write sometime about the one time he told me he was upset with me, he said he’d been meaning to say this for years and finally got the nerve.

For a long time, these differences balanced them well. When Dad would go a little too far off into a plan he wanted for a new career or whatever, my mom would step in and be like Brian that makes no sense we’re not doing that. When my mom would, with the best of intentions, speak very practically about something emotional, my dad would step in and smooth over the tension. But they both had the same goal every day: to love their kids as best they can.

(I know I know I’m very lucky.)

My mom tells the story of how they met as follows. My mom had just broken up with a dude who was cheating on her. She was super bummed and she says, “So my girlfriend Wendy said, ‘I’m taking you out. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet your future husband tonight,’ and I said, ‘What kind of guy am I going to meet at a dive bar on a Wednesday night,’ and anyway that night I met your dad.”

My dad was older than she was and ready to settle down and my mom was hot as hell. My mom wanted kids and knew my dad would be a great father. They were married within six months.

My dad had a kid already when he met my mom. There are a lot of details to that story that aren’t mine to share, but I’ll just say my sister’s biological mom had many flaws and the custody battle was brutal. My parents got primary custody of my older sister when she was three. They had me the next year then my two younger siblings.

My mom was right. My dad was a great father. They parented well together, with their differences creating balance mostly. But eventually they grew to be unhappy. Those discrepancies in personality caused them to want different things. Different houses, different hobbies, different jobs. They had been living together, as coparenting friends, for fifteen years but I don’t think they’d been in love most of that time. I don’t know about my siblings, but I could tell. My mom and I used to take walks early in the mornings during the summer. I was an anorexic insomniac so when my mom asked my 11 year old self if I wanted to get up and have coffee with her then go exercise, every disorder in my body was happy to oblige. My grandmother, also my mom’s best friend, passed away that year. I found my mom confiding in me on our walks. She tried to keep it pretty PG but she was hurting and grieving and always said I “had an old soul.” She shared about how their relationship had changed, how she was much less happy than she had expected to be.

When they split I was mostly relieved. It was hard in some ways for sure. But they were always our parents first, and divorced second. Today, as I personally deal and see others dealing with visitation schedule nightmares, I laugh to myself. There was no “visitation,” with my family. There were two houses, and wherever you ended up that night, you ended up. The only rule was make sure both parents know where you are. “Visitation,” often had to do with if I worked the next day or not, since my dad’s house was across the street from the grocery store that was my high school job.

My parents still supported each other in the ways they had before the separation. They coordinated on gifts, they disciplined jointly. Mouthing off to my mom would get you a talking to by my dad before anyone else. My dad was constantly calling my mom to ask things like, “I’ve never bought my own underwear. What size am I?” Her response, for the record, was to roll her eyes and hang up, then toss a package of underwear at him next time she came by his house. I think she still buys most of his clothes.

When I got divorced, I remembered one of the biggest emotions I felt was as if I had failed. This wasn’t entirely true, I advocated for needs that weren’t met and chose to leave when they continued to not be met. But it still killed me that I had made vows and broken them. I like to keep promises. I didn’t like that about myself.

A few months ago, I was at my dad’s house going through old boxes of pictures. He saves everything, it drove my mom nuts. I came across a Father’s Day card my mom had written for my dad, sometime in the late 80s. My parents had been fighting for custody of my older sister and the card read:

Brian, I really feel for you on this Father’s Day. After all that has come between you and (my sister) in the last couple months, it has to make you feel less of a father. But I think I am right when I say that (she) couldn’t wish for a better daddy. Whatever you do in the years to come with, for and to get your daughter, I will be beside you all the way. I love you and her very much and I will be proud to be part of that family. Forever Yours, Laurie.

And the thing is, she never broke any of those promises. As we’ve grown, they’ve continued to co-parent. They still make sure that, together, we all have all we need from both our parents. They have six grandkids now, and just as with their kids, the ones who are “step,” aren’t treated any differently than the bios. And my parents are still the best of friends. We celebrate holidays together and after the first few it wasn’t awkward any more. Each of them have dated some, not much, over the years. The deal was the new partner was welcome, but needed to know the ex would be there and that that was non-negotiable.

Today, my parents have different priorities than they did when they were younger. They still aren’t in love. But they’ve gone off and had their separate lives, only needing to agree when it came to us kids. They lived them happily.

Today, mostly they want the same thing. They still don’t agree on the thermostat or on dish soap brands or how to do laundry. But mostly, they want a safe, happy space for those six grandkids and that’s about it. They have that now, together, with just enough room to still live apart. They cook together sometimes and coordinate on grandkid visits, but they have their own spaces. My mom has a little trailer thing on my dad’s property. My brother was right, it’s weird as hell but it works.

A few years ago, at Christmas, we were all sitting around and both my parents got the same gleam in their eyes. We watched them silently communicate, “Is it time?”

They left the room together and came out with four large, overflowing scrapbooks, one for each of us kids.

My dad had been saving things for years. School art projects, hand prints, even baby teeth and first hair cut trimmings. All the stuff my mom thought had been silly to save. Mom had gone out earlier that month and purchased the supplies, and Dad had stayed up for days putting these enormous books together, a set of childhood memories created for each one of us kids.

As our parents watched us that Christmas Day, crying over these phenomenal gifts, my mom said, “Brian I thought you were crazy for saving all this. It drove me nuts.” My dad smiled. She said, “But I guess. Maybe it wasn’t as crazy as I thought. Just this once. Maybe. You were right.”