40 years
This Friday my parents will celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. I can barely imagine such a thing, although I will turn forty this year and so was present for most of their marriage. Forty years is a generation, half a lifetime and more.
I know from my own marriage that despite the fact that you remain married to the same person all those years, one or both is you is continually in the process of reinventing yourself, so that now I feel as though I’ve been about four distinctly different people myself during our eighteen years of wedded bliss, and my husband has been at least three himself. I can’t imagine how many past selves people the history of my parents’ marriage, despite having witnessed it myself. I remember some of those people—my very much younger father fishing weekends with his friends, a long series of photographs of Daddy with Jack or Larry or Tommy and the line of bass they caught that Saturday lined up in front of them. My mother with braces and in nursing school, testing the veins of every boyfriend I brought home to see how easy it would be to draw blood or insert an IV. Both slimmer and with more hair, they seemed ancient to me at the time, but were so young when they married that I can’t imagine they must have felt they knew what they were doing as they raised first me and then my brother, at the same time they were growing up themselves.
They bought a house just before my brother was born, if I remember rightly, a red house that I loved for the huge oak tree with the rope swing and the log cabin playhouse my father built me in the side yard. We would go down to the shop after dinner to see whatever Daddy was working on, mounting a fish or building something—I can’t even think what now. I would sit on the old green stool he still has in his shop today, smelling sawdust and watching the sky outside darken. My mother I remember mostly in the kitchen, cooking and doing laundry after we finally got a washer and dryer and no longer had to take our weekly trips to the grocery store and laundrymat, and then later studying her anatomy and physiology textbooks at the kitchen table. I don’t remember them together much, but they always presented a unified front, even when much later I began to see that they disagreed about things, though they would not discuss those differences in front of their children. I have only rare memories of them ever fighting. My parents have always had a private marriage; although they would affectionately kiss good-bye and hello in front of my friends—appallingly enough in my teenaged mind—I know little of their conflicts and commonalities.
I know they love each other, and I have watched that love deepen over the years, more so it seemed after my brother and I grew up and moved out, perhaps not coincidentally. But I am still not sure I could define exactly why they love each other. What must have brought them together forty years ago, and how much of that original force is still present in the marriage they have evolved into today? In the photograph of their wedding day, my parents stand next to each other more grinning than smiling, my mother in a short yellow dress and a matching hat, my father looking awkward in his black suit next to her parents. Now that I think of it, I’ve never even seen my father’s parents in any of the wedding photographs—I’ve only seen three or four of them. I know my grandmother was there; she was a hairdresser and my mother’s mother told me only recently that Nana did her hair for the wedding. They didn’t take many pictures that day, Grandma told me, because Mama’s father didn’t want her to get married; at seventeen, she was too young, he thought. The ceremony itself and the reception afterwards were small, just family, and I imagine exciting, but quickly over with as all wedding services are, and maybe a little uncomfortable. It’s hard for me to imagine how one brief day, with just the one faded old photograph I have to document it, could have been the beginning of the life my parents now lead.
A good friend of mine is expecting her first child, and she asked me recently how having a child changes you. I had to tell her that I could barely remember the person I was before I had my daughter eleven years ago, that something about the experience of having her and then later my son seems to have obscured the person I was. She’s still buried somewhere in there. I still love many of the same things I did before, still read the same books, still want many of the same things, but I feel fundamentally different. Marriage also changed who I felt myself to be, though it was more subtle, took more time. From the earliest days of our marriage, when I woke up in our cinder-block wall first apartment, all we could afford, and got ready for work, feeling all the time like an actor, to the last time Chris and I left work early to meet for coffee without our children, we always have to remember to work together in love. The old worn out farm metaphor of the oxen hitched together served so well to show young couples the difficulty of staying together on the path, the sometimes restrictive feeling of the harness, but most of all the strength of two people working together. For my parents, I imagine all the changes in their lives—two children, three homes, a whole series of jobs and even their many dogs—somehow changed the chemistry between them, sometimes separating them, sometimes bringing them closer. They are still the people they were in my earliest memories, my mother always loving to cook, my father always outside in the yard, but they have become something more than that, two friends and lovers, a man and woman, husband and wife who have built a shared history just as surely as they have built their garden each year, working both separately and together on the tomatoes and the crookneck squash.
I know from my own marriage that despite the fact that you remain married to the same person all those years, one or both is you is continually in the process of reinventing yourself, so that now I feel as though I’ve been about four distinctly different people myself during our eighteen years of wedded bliss, and my husband has been at least three himself. I can’t imagine how many past selves people the history of my parents’ marriage, despite having witnessed it myself. I remember some of those people—my very much younger father fishing weekends with his friends, a long series of photographs of Daddy with Jack or Larry or Tommy and the line of bass they caught that Saturday lined up in front of them. My mother with braces and in nursing school, testing the veins of every boyfriend I brought home to see how easy it would be to draw blood or insert an IV. Both slimmer and with more hair, they seemed ancient to me at the time, but were so young when they married that I can’t imagine they must have felt they knew what they were doing as they raised first me and then my brother, at the same time they were growing up themselves.
They bought a house just before my brother was born, if I remember rightly, a red house that I loved for the huge oak tree with the rope swing and the log cabin playhouse my father built me in the side yard. We would go down to the shop after dinner to see whatever Daddy was working on, mounting a fish or building something—I can’t even think what now. I would sit on the old green stool he still has in his shop today, smelling sawdust and watching the sky outside darken. My mother I remember mostly in the kitchen, cooking and doing laundry after we finally got a washer and dryer and no longer had to take our weekly trips to the grocery store and laundrymat, and then later studying her anatomy and physiology textbooks at the kitchen table. I don’t remember them together much, but they always presented a unified front, even when much later I began to see that they disagreed about things, though they would not discuss those differences in front of their children. I have only rare memories of them ever fighting. My parents have always had a private marriage; although they would affectionately kiss good-bye and hello in front of my friends—appallingly enough in my teenaged mind—I know little of their conflicts and commonalities.
I know they love each other, and I have watched that love deepen over the years, more so it seemed after my brother and I grew up and moved out, perhaps not coincidentally. But I am still not sure I could define exactly why they love each other. What must have brought them together forty years ago, and how much of that original force is still present in the marriage they have evolved into today? In the photograph of their wedding day, my parents stand next to each other more grinning than smiling, my mother in a short yellow dress and a matching hat, my father looking awkward in his black suit next to her parents. Now that I think of it, I’ve never even seen my father’s parents in any of the wedding photographs—I’ve only seen three or four of them. I know my grandmother was there; she was a hairdresser and my mother’s mother told me only recently that Nana did her hair for the wedding. They didn’t take many pictures that day, Grandma told me, because Mama’s father didn’t want her to get married; at seventeen, she was too young, he thought. The ceremony itself and the reception afterwards were small, just family, and I imagine exciting, but quickly over with as all wedding services are, and maybe a little uncomfortable. It’s hard for me to imagine how one brief day, with just the one faded old photograph I have to document it, could have been the beginning of the life my parents now lead.
A good friend of mine is expecting her first child, and she asked me recently how having a child changes you. I had to tell her that I could barely remember the person I was before I had my daughter eleven years ago, that something about the experience of having her and then later my son seems to have obscured the person I was. She’s still buried somewhere in there. I still love many of the same things I did before, still read the same books, still want many of the same things, but I feel fundamentally different. Marriage also changed who I felt myself to be, though it was more subtle, took more time. From the earliest days of our marriage, when I woke up in our cinder-block wall first apartment, all we could afford, and got ready for work, feeling all the time like an actor, to the last time Chris and I left work early to meet for coffee without our children, we always have to remember to work together in love. The old worn out farm metaphor of the oxen hitched together served so well to show young couples the difficulty of staying together on the path, the sometimes restrictive feeling of the harness, but most of all the strength of two people working together. For my parents, I imagine all the changes in their lives—two children, three homes, a whole series of jobs and even their many dogs—somehow changed the chemistry between them, sometimes separating them, sometimes bringing them closer. They are still the people they were in my earliest memories, my mother always loving to cook, my father always outside in the yard, but they have become something more than that, two friends and lovers, a man and woman, husband and wife who have built a shared history just as surely as they have built their garden each year, working both separately and together on the tomatoes and the crookneck squash.
posted by Lisa at 4/29/2006 12:52:00 PM
