Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004
A memory before I go to sleep
I've been fussing on and off since Saturday with the paper I'm supposed to be writing for my Marrige and Family Class.
The topic is what marriage means to me.
In all the thinking and remembering I've been doing to try and figure this out, I kep pulling myself back to one memory of my parents.
As a rule my memories of my parents together (the ones I haven't blocked out) aren't happy. Most involve fights and arguments, others arent of them together because really as a little kid my happiest times with mom and dad were when i was with one of them alone.
I do have one memory that differs from all this.
One tiny, 30 seconds in time, happening that I've held on to for dear life since I was probably five.
It was a Saturday morning. I slowly opened my eyes, feeling as if I was being watched. I looked up to see my mom and dad peering around the doorway, both smiling at me.
To me, this is the only real evidence I have that somewhere, at sometime my parents did love each other.
It's strange though to summon up old memories of them, how young they were, how different they were.
My dad was my hero and I had no idea how lucky I was to have the mom I do.
I think my dad has changed the most in my eyes.
I used to go everywhere with him. My world fell down around me the night I watched him move his stuff out of our house one laundry basket at a time.
I knew things wouldn't get better if he stayed, but I didn't want my daddy to leave.
As I look back on things now I realize that it was soon after that my view of my dad started changing a bit. I also started former the tight bond I have with my mom now.
My mom has changed and really evolved a lot in her own right, and from time to time I can remember moments that I had realizations so to speak of things changing in her.
An issue arises in my memories around this time, again I have things that are hazy, most of them around my dad. I blocked a lot of things around my parents marriage and then a lot of the things I did with my dad when I visited him. I have memories here and there, but until Krysti comes into the picture not a lot.
I know I have more memories with my mom because I lived with her, had a majority of my raising with her, and probably 90% of my happy memories are with her, but nothings hazy like it is with my dad. Rarely does anything escape me when I think about times in our little apartment.
In my heart of hearts I feel a bit guilty to say that my happiest time in life was with just me and mom in that apartment.
True that was also the stage for the many power struggles and even shouting matches we had, but it was also were I learned just how much my mom would do to make sure I was taken care of and happy.
To end this, before I cry again and get further away from the important part if this entry way at the top, I think about all that stuff, all the crap that been flung back and forth, the power struggles, court hearings, legal threats, etc, that I've hear over the past 14 years, I take out that memory from its safe place in my mind and I smile.
I remember one tiny moment in the middle of the living hell that house could be and remember how they looked, how happy everything seemed.
We were a family.
harlemrain at 3:59 am