Burlap & Satin

*This might just be the first in a series of entries. I have a lot of feelings to swim around in this week.

On this day 32 years ago, my parents were married straight out of high school in a back yard ceremony complete with leisure suits, homemade dresses, permed hair and floppy straw hats. On this day 31 years ago, I was due to be born on what would have been their one year wedding anniversary. Today, my father has finally found happiness with his fourth wife, my mother is preparing to go through her fifth divorce and I feel as though I have lived my lifetime plus three others in my short time on this planet. My parents were incredibly young when they married, even still younger when they met. I don't doubt that they loved each other, I just don't think they loved each other enough and in the right ways. Honestly, how much can you really know about give-and-take and marriage when you are 19 with a baby? How much can you have possibly healed and learned from your own faulty upbringings when you are still barely an adult yourself?

It is for this reason I look back on some of the crazy things they did and simultaneously laugh and ache inside. You know that question people always ask you, "what's your very first memory?" I've listened my whole life to other people's responses and I've continuously been surprised at their answers. "Looking out the bars of my crib," some will say or "watching my mother coo at me in my highchair," or "my dad smiling at me and he looks so young." Me? I remember absolutely nothing before the age of four. My life does not begin with cooing noises from my mother or looking out a crib at my toys. I have two very distinct memories and it always seems as if they are within moments or days of each other. The lighting is the same, the tension in the room is the same, the mood is virtually unchanged from one memory to the next. In one, my father is in the kitchen yelling at someone on the phone and pacing back and forth while my mother and I sit at the coffee table in the living room. She is tense, anxious and talking in very upbeat tones in order to distract me from my father's rising voice. We have crayons and paper. She is teaching me how to write my name. We trace it out on the paper again and again. I have the most trouble with the R. (Surely, you knew my name wasn't Staz, yes?) All the while she glances into the kitchen to check on my father's rising aggravation. And just like that, I have learned how to write my name and the image is gone.

In the very next memory, honestly what feels like only days later, I am sitting on the living room couch. My mother is to my left and my father is to my right, but they are not sitting with me. Instead they are crouching, staring at me with an intensity that seems new to me. The only light is coming from the kitchen and the street lamp outside. For some reason, it is very dark in our living room. I don't remember exactly how my mother broke the news to me, but I remember clear as day her next question. "Do you want to live with mommy or daddy?" As an adult, I can only imagine what was going through their minds at that very moment, what thoughts could have been filling their faces with so much stress and tension. But at that time, I was only four and thought this was the most fun game we had ever played. Such a strange question, such serious faces, such power - all given to me! I remember smiling really big and then with a laugh, shouting "Daddy!" In my four year old mind, I fully expected to be picked up and tickled or that my parents would dissolve into wild peals of laughter. Instead, my mother collapsed into the floor, wailing hysterically and crying uncontrollably. My father just stared at me stupefied as though he had just had the gut punch of his life and was not ready for it. The feeling that actually occurred within me is something that even to this day, I cannot accurately describe. It is the feeling of your entire innards dropping, your life swirling into a spin that even you cannot keep up with, your child-like innocence disappearing in a confusing flash, and reality dropping upon you so heavily it makes your head hurt. It is the feeling of being four and then suddenly being forty. The memory fades away after this. I can only guess my four-year-old brain was too overwhelmed to process anymore and so erased it all away.

I understand that my parents were trying to do the right thing. They were trying to give me a choice in my own destiny. Sure, it may have been misguided, and they may have taken my answer a bit too seriously, but at the age of 23, who really know what's right for themselves, much less a child? In the end, I was raised by my father, just as my answer that night had stipulated. It wasn't the perfect upbringing by any means, but I do honestly believe that I am better for it. My father is not a perfect man, but he was certainly stable and provided for me in a way my mother never had the confidence to do herself. She moved a lot, she drank a lot, she dated horrible men, married men even worse than those she dated. I feel very certain that if I had chosen my mother, I would have ended up molested and beaten by the men that abused her as well. While my father's taste in wives was certainly less than stellar, he was still there for me when it counted and always tried to give me stability above all else. I graduated high school with the same friends I'd had in kindergarten. I grew up on the same road my family lived on. I rode my bike down every country backroad that I still associate with "home" today.

It's just an odd place to be in when you were originally due to be born on the very day your parents failed marriage began. Instead though, I was born exactly one week late. My cousin's birthday was one day earlier and everyone was so excited that we might have dual birthdays. I needed to forge my own way though and I think the universe realized that. So I was born exactly one day after him because I am stubborn and demanded to have my own day. It didn't matter though, because they always made us share a cake anyway.

I think it's funny how life always comes full circle. My parents were married July 22nd. I married my own husband on June 22nd. I grew up sharing cake and birthday parties with my cousin because of our close birthdays. Husband grew up sharing his birthday with his twin brother. Now, living separate lives as adults and having moved away from our twins and cousins, we find it highly ironic that J. and I end up sharing our birthdays anyway - with each other. We were born three days (though four years) apart. Still, when our family comes together, it is all of our names on one birthday cake.

We are all lumped in together in this crazy stew of life. My parents, throughout my entire life, have always remained close friends. I don't have a single memory of them fighting over me or screaming at each other about how I should be raised. They have different opinions, they have different personalities, they are different people. Still, they are connected through me and their traits run deep within me. My father's very happy fourth marriage? Well, ten years ago, he married my mom's older sister. Again, the circles, they go round and round. It is a very harmonious situation with everyone happy and satisfied and even comfortable. Though now, I am in an even stranger position. When I go home for Christmas, I am still a child of nearly ten divorces, but my mother and father are both in one house. They are not married to each other and they are not enemies. They are just what they are, two people that once loved each other, had a child and remained a family.