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My Parents Weren't Scholars

Just Two Kids

By Scotty FrenchPublished 7 years ago 6 min read
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My parents were not scholars. They were not socialites. They were not bright, optimistic, souls with hope for their futures. They were, in fact, kids who grew up too soon with ugly pasts and sad, sad scars, not knowing how to function in a hapless world that moved too fast for their liking.

There are pictures, dozens of them. There are albums and folders and envelopes, filled to the brim with photographs that captured memories of a time gone by. When I was young, I looked to the few I had for hope. I looked to them to fill the hole I had in my heart with memories I was not yet there to make. There is a lesson to be learned from every marriage and every divorce. A lesson that heeds the rush and warns of the day you’ll wake up next to the person you chose to spend your life with and see a stranger.

I never knew my mom when I was little. Not really. But there are photos I can learn from now and stories I can listen to. Back then I had nothing.

My parents met because they had a mix of the same friends. It was purely a coincidence, in my opinion, that their orbits happened to intertwine one night. At this time, my dad lived in a one bedroom house in Middletown. He worked long hours to keep it. At one point it got so bad that he would come home around midnight, sometimes later.

Well, my dad had friends whose work hours didn’t match his of course. On an autumn night, around two in the morning, my dad got a call from his friend. Sure enough, my dad is asked to hang out with the group despite the fact that he got home just two hours beforehand. Now, my dad was never one to appreciate being woken up at two in the morning, especially not to go to an amusement park, but his friends "needed" him. Really, they needed his car.

So off he goes, into the night to pick up his friends. It was his friend, Lorrie and her brothers. Lorrie brought company. What my dad didn’t know was that this friend of Lorrie’s would be the love of his life (for 18 years or so). My dad has told me that the first time he saw my mom, he knew she was the one. I can’t deny it because of the way he looked when he said it.

I ask my parents about how they met and where it all went wrong sometimes and I know it hurts them to dig up the past, but I know I need to know these things in order to learn for my future.

My mom said no to marrying my dad three times. Actually, that was just on the night they met. He’s where I get my persistence from. When they finally did start their lives together, they didn’t understand the complications they would face. Mom’s parents didn’t approve of their daughter dating a black guy who was seven years older than her (this was the 80s after all), and neither of them had any experience being with anyone but themselves. I think a lot of the things that my parents did were done because they thought it had to be done. I think marriage was expected of them, a whole life waiting on a ring to prove that you’re not alone in this world. Insanity.

“There’s never an easy answer for life”. My mom told me that when I asked her when she knew she had to leave. My parents tried, they really did, but things start to take a toll on you very quickly when all the sudden you’re thrust into married life with two kids and barely a means of getting by. Things were over before they began.

And then there was the house. The original five-hundred square foot home could not sustain a family, so we built upon it. My dad wanted to be the father he never had. I say any father is better than the one he had, but that’s a story for another time. Well, maybe it’s not. My dad grew up separated from his siblings, raised by a pathological liar of an aunt who told him he was his mother. Can I really blame him?

He wanted a place for his kids to be kids, but he ended up ripping his family apart. Every nail, every board placed in that house created a space too big now to be filled with the sounds of laughter and joy. You can’t build a house, have two kids under the age of five, spend maximum just thirty dollars a week, and be content under a one income household. It just doesn’t work.

It isn’t easy to pack up and leave your life behind after eighteen years, I know that. But it would be a lie if I said I didn’t ever resent my mom for doing it. No matter how much I know, how well I understand things or how much I change. I’m still the little four-year-old that my mom left behind; still confused, still angry, still hurt.

It isn’t easy. It isn’t easy knowing that your brothers helped your mother through the pregnancy more than your father. It isn’t easy knowing that when you were born, your mother was all alone with you in the hospital room for days because your father thought she "needed time alone." It isn’t easy knowing that your father would've rather gone to jail than pay child support for you if your mother left him. It isn’t easy feeling like your mother only wanted to take you with her because her mother thought she had to and not because she wanted to. It isn’t easy being an accident. It isn’t easy not knowing where your next meal is coming from. It isn’t easy watching your mother leave and not understanding why no one was chasing after her like in the movies. It isn’t easy watching all the mothers on mother’s day in school be there for and love their kids and waiting for your mother to miraculously show up just to be let down every single year. It isn’t easy knowing that your mother left, not because she had to, but because she chose someone else over you.

It isn’t easy, but we still get up every single day and go through it. It will never get easier, but with time it becomes less foreign and it becomes a feeling you get used to. Because you’ve never known anything else in the world. I’m 17 now; my mom has officially missed three quarters of my life, so I'm used to it. Not seeing her for years at a time and knowing that there are three thousand miles between us is something I'm used to.

I am the product of two kids who didn’t know what they were doing. I am the product of growing up with no mother, a father who worked two hours away and brothers who are over a decade older than I. I am the product of flinching when someone raises their hand or voice, even if it’s not to hurt me. I am the product of low self-esteem and anger issues and problem after problem, conflict after conflict, all with no solution in sight.

There once was a space between my parents. A universe that brought them together and ultimately tore them apart. My parents tried. They really did. But sometimes trying isn’t enough. What can I say? My parents weren't scholars.

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