When it comes to romantic relationships, I haven't had the
typical experiences you might expect of a nearly 31-year-old. I've never lived
with a partner. I've never come close to being married. I've been in love, but
it was a beautiful, transitory kind of thing: at 24, we were both on the cusp
of discovering who we really were. And in the end, it turned out that what that
meant was we had to say goodbye.
So you could say that the most significant relationship of my
life has really been the one I observed between my parents. Although I wasn't
privy to the ebbs and flows that marked the interior life of their marriage, I
think I can safely say that they were bound together by the fundamental truth
of their love for each other.
My father, a stoic man's man, took care of my mother above all
others. He gave her unique oddities to show his love - a makeshift
transportable shower for camping trips at
the beach; a wine cooler decorated with bursting purple
bougainvillea flowers that was meant to last a single dinner party but traveled with us for 20 years; a now-famous ballad he wrote to describe the
social minefield she had waded into in the form of an extended Queensland
country clan.
All these things have passed into legend in our family - proof
that a love really existed as we thought it did.
Because this has been my most significant relationship so far,
it's also the one that's been most difficult to let go of. I always believed
that my parents would shine on through together until the end. That they would,
as they promised gaily so many times, spend their lives together right up until
their inevitable parting.
Like all the mythologies passed around our dinner table, we knew
this one off by heart: they would sit hand in hand on a cliff overlooking the
ocean and watch the sunset. And as that sun burnt out for the very last time,
so too would they.
Of course, it didn't work out that way. When the time came for
my mother to go, there was no cliff top and no sunset. Just a family with heavy
hearts, a room perfumed by the stale smell of death and the racked body of a
weeping man who'd promised to love her until the end.
Although I mourned my mother for myself, I mourned her mostly
for my father. It was difficult for me to see him in such emotional agony. He
was only 54 when my mother died from cancer and I knew there could be 30 or
more good years left in him. How could I want him to spend them alone, living
with just his memories? I wanted him to be happy. He deserved that much, at
least.
Still, I couldn't help but feel a little betrayed when he
remarried a few years later. I had already lost my mother, and the most selfish
part of me felt I was losing the fundamental ties that still held me to my
father. It was difficult to see him profess love for another woman, and hear
him talk about how happy she made him, but he seemed to have a new lease on
life.
When Mum was alive, he had been committed to work, often overseas for
long periods and only home for short bursts.
Death might force you to reassess what's important in your life,
but I couldn't help but feel a bitter irony that the woman who was now getting
to enjoy this more relaxed version of my father wasn't the one who'd endured
those long absences.
Our family dynamic changed rapidly. We'd all become very close
after my mother died, and had begun to develop an easy kind of friendship. But
his new relationship seemed to change that. It felt apparent to my siblings and
me that our company was no longer needed as often, and that on the times we did
see him, he would come as part of a package deal.
There are so many conflicting emotions when people remarry after
the death of a spouse. Our father naturally wanted to make sure his new partner
felt welcome - but there were times when his efforts to do so made his children
feel less like family, and more like part of a support crew they hadn't signed
up for.
It didn't even seem as if we could talk about it, as mention of my mother
had been all but banished. Last year, my dad's birthday coincided with Mother's
Day. I phoned him to wish him happy birthday, and he told me how he and his
wife had celebrated the latter with her children. Having acknowledged the date,
he still didn't ask how I was feeling.
It isn't easy. I don't know if it will ever be. My father has
moved back to Queensland and, due to distance, sees more of his wife's family
than his own. I know he wishes it were otherwise. And adjusting to this
situation has brought up in me a maelstrom of emotions - bitterness, anger,
sadness, happiness, joy.
In my darker moments, I have been guilty of uncharitable
thoughts. In my sadder ones,
I have been overcome by the feeling that I've lost a part of him
forever. Most of the time,
I just get on with things.
We forget, as children, that our parents are humans, too. We
can't expect our love to be enough to carry a now-single parent through the
long days and nights that loneliness brings.
So we feel jealous, betrayed,
angry and stubborn - and we rage at the sky and make unkind jokes with our
siblings - but these feelings pass, and we can hopefully see what's real. That
our parent, once so sad, is happy again.
And perhaps that's all that matters.....!
0 comments:
Post a Comment