Alone on Christmas

My father, age 85.

My dad has been married twice. His first marriage to my mother lasted 32 years. His second marriage is barely limping along at the 22 year mark. Last spring, my oldest brother and I took my dad to lunch. During our time together, my father was quick to abandon his usual topics and began listing some unusual "new" behaviors that characterized his wife.


For our benefit, he enlisted a bold palette to color a vision of a woman who washed her towels and bed sheets every day, threw clothes away as fast as she could buy them and loitered by the clothes dryer late at night to drown the sounds of clandestine phone calls. He shared with us that his wife had recently refused to wash his clothes, shop for his groceries, prepare his dinner or clean the bathroom where he bathed. She had also become a fan of sending and receiving text messages, at all hours of the day.  The two had become room mates and one of them, apparently, had a secret. While my brother and I heard oral confirmation that his wife was indeed a crazy bat, a notion I had held since I met her, my father suspected infidelity.


My brother offered three words to our father: cell phone detail. The devil is in the details after all. Four days later, detail in hand, my dad telephoned me. He had highlighted a suspicious phone number, tallied the minutes, and noted the times of day. With minimal sleuthing, my dad had also identified the owner of the phone number. The next step was confrontation. Not prone to controversy of any kind, my father decided to leave the cell phone detail on the kitchen counter.


Since then, volatility has been the only accurate measure of their marriage and his wife has "left him" and returned on a number of occasions. Her abandonment pattern is unpredictable and ranges from just a few days to being gone for more than a month's time. This story is still unfolding.


What have I learned? I have learned that love dies slowly and deliberately.  I realize that loyalty enjoys a mystical place of honor that cannot always be rationalized or explained using words.  I know now that people cannot be talked out of love. There are more lessons here, but I'm not sure I'm ready to express them.


My dad spent this past Christmas alone. His wife was in abandonment mode, and despite my earnest invitation to include him in our holiday, he opted to go it alone. 

Fidelity

A commitment I believe in.

Most of us have a hot button (or two). One of mine is having a commitment to fidelity. A breach of fidelity in a marriage need not involve a physical gesture. No, indeed, emotional infidelity can trump any touch. When I was a much younger person, my family life combusted. I witnessed a breakup so heart-wrenching, I realized for the first time how powerful the game of love can be, especially for the loser. In fact, we were all losers - my mother, my two brothers and their families, and poor little old unmarried me.

For my mother, surpassing thirty two years of marriage felt like reaching a bomb shelter at the edge of a field, some kind of safety check-point where she could finally breathe. But the heart is a tricky beast, and there was to be no rest for the weary. My mother experienced rejection at a time when she looked forward to retirement with her husband and buying a house on the Cape.

My father had other ideas. A woman that he had known when he was a teenager had looked him up, finding it difficult to pick up the pieces on her own as she exited her own failed marriage. My Dad was her ticket back to normalcy (and a provider to boot).

So there I was, only a few months from leaving for college, and my life felt like a snow globe, never knowing when the storm would pass and the night would be still. My nuclear family life was never the same, and I can say with full disclosure, never truly good again. An awful lot more went down in the months that followed the revelation of my Dad's infidelity. I'll leave that for another time. Through it all, my takeaway has never left me. I feel unwavering disdain for cheating behavior, and I don’t believe in excuses. I do believe, however, in the idea that some people move on from one another, and cease to make their relationship a priority. Please notice that I did not say that I believe that people fall out of love. I'm just not sure I believe in that.