Today’s been a long day. Evidently, everything I know about how my Mom and Dad met, the trajectory of their romance, all of the family lore — is just not true.
Had you asked me this morning how Mom and Dad met, I’d have said, “Oh, it was sad. Mom’s sister Dolores died in a car accident driving from Saint Louis to visit Mom at the University. Dad was the friend of a friend at the University who drove Mom back home.”
This is why I was surprised to read Mom’s early letters to Dad detailing Dolores’ New Year’s Eve plans, facial routine, and favorable opinion of Dad as a boyfriend.
”Maybe she dies later,” I thought. But still, how did they meet if not in the darkest Meet Cute story ever?
You know what else is family lore? The decline of her marriage. The lore is Jerry began flirting, Mom got jealous, they went to counseling, she fought for her marriage, then went to Saint Louis and rediscovered Dan and self-esteem, said “screw this marriage,” and filed for divorce.
I was just thumbing through another stack of letters and saw that she filed for divorce the week before she went back to Saint Louis.
Now, I can see spinning that. You want to tell your kids you were the injured party, and you tried, but their father didn’t. That makes sense. And I forgive her anything, because she’s my Mom,and a great mom at that. (And an adorable girlfriend, three funny letters a day, the cuteness it’s exhausting.)
And I’m not mad at all, just puzzled. Wouldn’t there have been a conversation beginning with “You’re an adult now, so here’s the real story” — oh, well no, because there was David, and he was never an adult.
You know how I feel tonight? There was a story on NPR once about a black baby born into a white family. White mom, white dad. He was told all his life he was white so that’s what he told people. Eventually, enough people corrected him so that he had a talk with his mother, and he discovered the family history he’d been given was not true.
My case is not that extreme. But today has been exhausting. I read a three inch stack of letters and it took hours, with the calculating and recalculating, adjusting my memories, and updating the timeline worksheet.
This is probanly why I don’t remember reading these letters in 2018, I must have gotten a hint there were discrepancies and I just closed the box.
But now, it’s a project. Maybe a letter a day, though, I’ll scale it back.