Back in December of 2017 I looked in the box marked “Mom correspondence” and read Mom’s letters. Somehow I skipped the letters sent from my soon-to-be stepfather, aka “Dad”.
This new information from Dad’s letters all prompted me to check the dates and make a spreadsheet to track who did what to whom and when, because what I always held to be the timeline did not hold up.
The previous timeline: my father Jerry has an affair with a new lady at his new job, Mom gets jealous, Mom takes me back to visit her parents in St. Louis and leaves Dave with Jerry, after a few months Mom calls up her old boyfriend, they “fall into each other’s arms” (until my forties I assumed they hugged and held hands), Mom gets her own apartment in St. Louis, and by the end of six months is divorced from Jerry and after months of pleading from my (step)Dad she marries him.
I’m having to revise that timeline now that I’ve read the letters my Dad wrote Mom during her separation, plus a letter from Mom’s neighbor that flatly relates that Jerry’s co-worker was spending the night —
“Not your business!” you cry, appalled. I say it is my business, given that I was five and my life blew up in months.
How many months? Two. Not six months as I had thought. Two. Two months from separation to finalized divorce.
The question of who did what to whom — first — is still pretty ambiguous, as the letter from the neighbor isn’t dated. Evidently Mom had to convince the judge that Jerry was unstable, not that he cheated on her.
I remembered in my forties Mom said she believed Jerry hadn’t — technically — been unfaithful. At the time I scoffed. Now that seems feasible, given that the whole thing fell apart so fast.
Two months.
And it would have been one month but Mom told Dad she needed a month to think before they took things to the next step.
Oh! Hey, that also explains why she got her own apartment after … one month. Look at that. So many things are falling into place with this new timeline.
It gives me things to admire (very brave, taking action like that) and things to not admire (at least I got to two months to adjust, David got no warning at all).
If reading Dad’s letters gave me a new point of view on Mom, it really gave me a new point of view on Dad, which I will tell you about tomorrow.