Today is my parents 62nd anniversary. Wouldn't it be lovely if I could tell the story of a happily married couple who have lived lovingly and shared that love with their children? Too bad that's only a fairy tale for me. I believe that there was a time of love, a time when they shared common ideas and goals. Because I am the 5th and youngest child, I didn't live through my parents time of happiness. By the time I arrived, they had already formed an unhappy bond full of disdain for each other and opposing life goals. What one dreamed of, the other suffered through. Many times throughout my childhood I asked myself why they didn't get a divorce, why they didn't separate, but there were no really clear answers.
Today, as an adult, I look at their marriage through mature eyes . My head tells me that their relationship was codependent, that they couldn't live without each other even though they showed such outward disdain for one another. My mom was always the stronger one and she used that strength to bully my dad into doing whatever it was that she wanted him to do. Usually that meant lots of yelling and demanding that he get down to the barn to do chores. Since he never liked the farm or wanted the animals, he was always slow to respond and never quite in the manner that she wanted, Back and forth, back and forth, with Mom as the aggressor and Dad as the resistor.
In the later years of my parents time living together, things changed for the worse for several reasons. After Mom had her brain injury in 2004 and came back to the farm after a month in rehab, she became more dependent on my Dad to help her in the house. He was happy to see her come home initially, but soon they turned back to their old habits of yelling and criticizing each other. Mom's cognitive function never got back to where she had been before the accident and gradually it became obvious that she was declining. She still wanted to retain control over my dad and she did that through constant threats, yelling and checking up on what he was doing. His response was to withdraw, drink alcohol and stay in his room upstairs and watch TV. He didn't eat much and became very thin and weak. He was taken to the hospital a number of times due to falling and being unable to get up, and after the last time in 2008, he never returned to the farm again. My mom continued to live there by herself until August 2009 when an animal friend of hers whom she had bottle fed since birth, came into the house and head butted her(as rams are prone to do) causing her to fall and break her hip. As they say in the movies, the surgery was successful to pin the hip, but the patient....never recovered. Her brain took the biggest hit of all post-surgery and not only did she become completely confused and disoriented, but she also never walked nor stood again.
62 years. What does it mean? It means that my parents managed to raise 5 decent kids in spite of their own difficulties. It means that those 5 kids have given birth to 15 kids and adopted 11 from countries all over the world including Haiti, Honduras,Korea and the United States. Among us we have different lifestyles, different religious beliefs, different ways of expressing ourselves, but all of us have contributed something positive to the world.
