Relationships, Parents, Time, Life

My parents just celebrated their 40th anniversary! Because the nature of the parent-child relationship is that of unending self-sacrifice to overweening narcissism, and because it remains essentially impossible to truly imagine your parents having a life before you came along, I can only keep thinking of it in terms of myself: “they’ve been married longer than I’ve been alive!” which, you know, duh. It was the 1970s in Texas. Can you imagine my grandmother’s reaction to an out-of-wedlock baby? Not to mention the fact that they didn’t approve of my dad until like 5 years ago, which fills me with rage to this day. My amazing dad! But because he was, like, installing sprinklers when he and my mom started dating (and, more darkly and never quite spoken aloud, surely because he was an orphan from a working class family), they always turned up their noses at him. They’d do things like give him the exact same Christmas present several years in a row, such an epic fuck-you. Even as he’s spending all his vacations at their house enduring the n-word. My dad, the civil rights crusader! My dad, who waded into covering the racist judges for his TV news show in the 70s! My dad, who shamed the country club in Ft. Worth into admitting black people! My dad, who spent a year at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship. My grandparents: VERY unimpressed.

Anyway I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships. My parents have this great relationship. They’re not one of those old couples who’s still together out of habit. They really love each other. They pine for each other when they’re apart, almost to an uncomfortable degree for me because I am the one they call to tell about their loneliness. “I miss your Daddy so bad” is a phrase I have heard many times. My dad is less emotive, being a West Texas orphan boy from the 1950s whose shitty uncle told him scornfully that he wasn’t being “a man” after catching him crying AT HIS MOTHER’S FUNERAL at age thirteen, GOD the things you see when you don’t have a gun. Anyway my Dad’s mode of expressing his pining for my mom is just to call me ten times during the day just to chat. It’s so sweet and interesting that when they miss each other they call me. I mean, it’s also kind of gross.

Their relationship also isn’t one where they have no issues. They totally have issues. Everyone is a goddamn crazy person! How do any of us live with each other for forty years?? They make each other nuts but they figure it out. It’s weird how every relationship is different, too. You would assume that good, enriching relationships must all have something, some essence, in common, but I don’t know if they do. Or maybe it’s just something basic like “trust” or “general human respect.”

Every morning, my Dad wakes up between like 3-4 a.m. because he has horrible lifelong insomnia probably due to a variety of pretty obvious reasons that he refuses to do anything about, in classic Dad Fashion. He putters around, making coffee, getting his oatmeal ready for when it is actual human morning, reading one of his magazines–the New Yorker, American Scholar, the New York Review of Books. Around 5:00, thanks to some sort of Old Married Couple sixth-sense, he knows that my mom is just starting to stir up in bed, so he brings two cups of coffee up there, and then he sits on the bed and they drink coffee and talk. I can picture it so well, this foundational scene of my childhood. My mom in one of her long white cotton nightgowns, with her glasses on, sitting up in bed slowly waking up while the dawn starts creeping in the windows. What do they talk about? Here I have no insight, as whenever I intrude upon this scene the tenor of the conversation changes to incorporate an outsider. After awhile of sitting and talking and drinking coffee, they get up and if it’s winter my mom puts yoga pants and a sweatshirt on over her nightgown, and if it’s summer she just keeps rocking the nightgown. My mother’s nightgowns! When I am old, I will have a chest full of them and every once in awhile I will open it in secret and clutch them to me and sob.

Then they communally putter around together, this time incorporating yoga into the mix. My dad does some stretches; checks on his oatmeal; does some sit-ups. My mom does a headstand for 10 minutes; does other insane advanced yoga poses; makes a grocery list. They each send me approximately 750 emails during this time (notes, reminders, simple requests that I enjoy my day and know that they love me, more specific injunctions (“good luck teaching Frankenstein today! You’ll be great!”), questions about how to use YouTube, forwarded New York Times articles, random forwards from their friends, questions about Miley Cyrus, etc.). Then they both take a hilarious assortment of potions and pills that has changed and expanded over the years but that usually includes some combination of: algae, flaxseed oil, various vitamins, an aspirin for my dad’s heart, raw kale, and a spoonful of straight nutritional yeast (!!! WHAT THE FUCK). Basically anything they read about being good for you, they then start eating huge spoonfuls of it every morning. And if you are like, “you know Dad, nutritional yeast is actually really good in salad dressings” they wave you off. NO THANKS WE WILL CONTINUE EATING HUGE PLAIN MOUTHFULS OF IT.

At last it is like 7 a.m. and it is time to shower and get dressed. At this point if my brother and I are there it starts being really crazy to them that we are still asleep but they leave us alone. When we finally arise they perform astonishment and call us “Sleeping Beauty” and immediately start pressing oatmeal and raw kale smoothies on us. My mom starts planning our day excitedly. This usually involves climbing at least a 13,000 foot mountain (or “thirteener” as they are colloquially called, as in the dismissive, “oh it wasn’t that great a hike, just a thirteener”), then going to a 2 hour long yoga class, then going home to read for awhile before going on a walk or perhaps a “short hike.” The last time I was home we walked from Crested Butte to Aspen across the mountains. It took 12 hours. My mom would’ve walked back the next day but in deference to their citified children she submitted to driving. I used to have to go downhill skiing every day of vacation but finally after breaking my jaw and becoming an adult and spending literally years firmly saying “no” she now respects the mystifying fact that I truly don’t want to. My dad is in awe of my ability to say no to my mother. I think it is one of the things he most admires about me. Regardless, we do still go on long cross-country ski trips. One time I was up all night throwing up and in the morning she was like “are you ready to go skiing?” I said yes.

Anyway, my parents have a ton of friends of all ages in their town, and every Sunday they meet them all at a cafe for breakfast. It’s really awesome when your parents have good close friends who are YOUR AGE. They throw parties when I am home, and they invite all “the young people,” and then they enjoy listening to us make pop cultural references they don’t get. They have all these 36 year old buddies who do things like drop by unannounced with a 12-pack and a homemade pie and then they stay up late drinking and laughing. My parents are 70!

At night they cook dinner, always a rad healthy situation with a million vegetables from their friend’s garden. They drink tequila and talk–again, about what I’m not sure and can’t really picture it, which I think is the mark of a cool relationship, that you have this private world no one else knows about–and then they read for awhile. Their bed is one of those where on each nightstand there is a stack of 10 books and you can immediately see which side of the bed belongs to which parent by glancing at the stack. My dad’s is a mix of heavy classic and contemporary fiction, perhaps a few biographies, and a couple NYRB. My mom’s is all heavy Buddhist texts, yoga books, a few self-helpy mom-books like The Power of Now, and whatever they are reading in Book Club (Wolf Hall, Cloud Atlas, Freedom, etc.). Their bed is always strewn with books and pairs of reading glasses. My parents have more pairs of reading glasses than anyone in the world. Glasses are all over the house, on every shelf, in every room. Glasses are used as bookmarks; glasses litter the kitchen table. When you borrow their car and you go to see if there’s an ice scraper in the glove compartment, you find that it (the compartment) contains at least nine pairs of glasses, along with:

– at least 3 expired insurance cards
– huge wads of napkins
– a small bag of weed
– 20 pens that don’t work
– old speeding tickets
– the key to the luggage carrier on a different car
– ski goggles
– bottles of vitamins
– an ancient Tampax
– old forgotten grocery lists and notes
– weird random mail
– tons of lone keys, always a mystery, and when you hold one up and say “what’s this?” they’ll be like “oh! I think that’s the key to the 6th avenue house!” and you’re like “where we lived in NINETEEN EIGHTY???”
– empty cassette boxes, sometimes with doobies in them

And my mom is constantly searching frantically for “her glasses” and I am like “which ones? The ones you are holding in your hand, the ones in your pocket, or one of the 9 pairs in the glovebox? Oh also there’s a couple pairs in the guest room” And she goes “oh lord!” One time she was so stressed about her glasses and they were sitting on her head and my old man pointed it out and my mom pretended to start crying and my dad jumped up and held her in his arms and said “Honey, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you”

Anyway, they are pretty cool dudes and I think a lot about how they’ve made it work all these years. I love hearing their stories about their wedding and honeymoon and everything that happened afterward. My mom and her long hair, my handsome dad and his sideburns. Such cool sun-kissed hippies, smoking pot and protesting the war and going to library school. They were both such good parents even though my Dad was an orphan and my mom had, shall we say, somewhat less good parents (my aunt, famously, talking about how hard grad school was: “I just feel like I want my mommy! I mean, obviously not MY mommy. I just feel like I want A mommy. Like I want YOUR mommy.”). They like being parents, but they also have other stuff in their lives, and they like to hear about the stuff we have in our lives. They are very involved. They do things like fly to a different state to see me play a show just for the heck of it. They read my article and asked me a bunch of questions about it. My dad always wants to copy-edit my work, and I let him, because he’s really good at it, being a lifelong newspaperman. They have all my albums and all my friends’ albums on their shelf and they actually listen to them. One time my mom sat down with Jona and me and a notebook and asked us to tell her all about “death metal.”

But they are also involved with each other, actively. They talk, they enjoy each other’s company. They have lots of projects together. They develop intense interests in the wild turkey who visits their yard every evening. They work on political campaigns; they build houses for Habitat for Humanity; they serve on various boards. I think maybe the biggest lesson their marriage has taught me is about compromise. Which is a cliché about long-term partnership but which is actually a very complex issue. I think real compromise is so hard because you have to make yourself vulnerable. You have to give up something you want or feel like you need, trusting that that sacrifice won’t be used against you. Trusting that the other person isn’t trying to get an advantage over you; that you aren’t opening the door to giving up ALL your wants and needs, forever. You have to compromise because you like them as a human, and you want them to be happy just as much as you want yourself to be happy, but it’s such a delicate balance between that and being taken advantage of, and, especially if you’ve been taken advantage of in the past, it can be so hard to trust that that’s not what’s happening this time. There’s also the kinds of compromise where you change yourself or do something you don’t want to do and then later you realize how good it was for you. My mom would never have moved away from Texas if it weren’t for my dad’s adventurous spirit, and now look at her. I can’t even imagine her life without skiing and mountain climbing in it. They are always compromising and changing for each other, even as they are staying stubbornly the same in other ways. I think when you’re younger you think of getting married as the end, like everything at that point STOPS and you are sort of frozen in time, but really–judging from my observation of my parents and from my own experience thus far–finding your life partner is when everything STARTS. The real work begins, the real satisfactions, the real adventures, the real exciting changes. Because your relationship makes your life so much bigger and grander than it was before, you are open to making bigger and grander choices and changes, internal ones as well as external. Because this person makes you feel something outside of yourself, you see yourself through their eyes, truly and honestly, and you become better able to lovingly embrace new ways of thinking and being. But also it becomes easier to identify the stuff about yourself that you probably can’t ever change, but, again because you can see yourself through their eyes, maybe you can come to peace with that stuff in a new way, because they love you in spite of it, or even in a weird way because of it. I see this with my parents.

The funny thing is that my old man and I talk about this stuff all the time. How our relationship works, what we like about it, how we have changed over the past ten years, how we would like to continue changing. But my parents don’t. They had their anniversary yesterday and my mom said my dad was cooking dinner. I said “what are you going to talk about during dinner?” and she said she didn’t know. I said they should reminisce about their life together, about what it was like when they first started dating, about how things have changed since, and what they enjoy about being together. She was astounded–such a conversation had never occurred to her. She was like “Wow! Okay, we will!!” And then later that night I got like four emails from her praising me for my great conversation idea, and saying that they’d just had the most wonderful talk about the past.

They are really people who don’t live in the past very much. My dad because his past is still so intensely raw and painful for him, because they didn’t have therapy in Texas in the 1950s and so too bad for you if you get orphaned in a sort of heinous melodramatic way. But even their life together, they don’t talk that much about it. To me, that is weird! I’ve barely begun my marriage but already we talk all the time about this stuff. It makes us feel good. It binds us to our past selves; it ties our life together. For them, the present is ongoing and they aren’t as interested in noting change. They are shocked again and again as though for the first time whenever something happens that forces them to notice how old they are. It’s funny that I am comprised of so many elements of both of them and yet I still find them a marvelous mystery. In some ways my marriage feels similar to what I perceive in my parents’ but in other ways it’s so profoundly different. I guess because we are different people; who knew?

One thing I never thought about before I got married is that your partner will slowly develop his own relationship with your parents, and if that relationship is a good one, it is so fun to watch it evolve. My old man now has his own inside jokes with my parents that don’t include me. When we visit them he fills his pockets with peppermints and then pretends my mom is a little kid he’s giving them to and she LOVES THIS. My dad calls him “Junior” because he took our last name, and he sends him emails about avant-garde film. For my dad’s 70th birthday my old man spent days researching and compiling a bibliography of everything my dad has ever worked on, in publishing. There was stuff on there my dad didn’t even remember. It was so cool to watch him read it and marvel (again, there’s that interest in the past vs. no interest in the past! Weird). My old man and my brother also have their own friendship. They recently wrote a screenplay together and I’d come home from work and they’d be in the living room giggling secretively.

Ugh now I am homesick

The moral of the story is cherish your loved ones this holiday season!!! BARF CITY but it’s true

Ok back to work