My parents getting divorced when I was 5, remarried a year later, and divorced a 2nd (and final) time within a year of remarrying marked the beginning of what was to become the most chaotic decade of my life. I remember how horrible it was after the first divorce. My father had moved a short distance away and we only saw him on weekends. Then when they remarried, I was ecstatic. He moved back in and the world seemed right again.
I was thinking about how odd it was that parents got married, divorced and remarried to each other so quickly so I asked my mom why she remarried him. She replied, “I needed health insurance“.
Wow. That was not what I expected to hear. I thought she’d say something about being in love, missing each other, doing it to keep the family together, giving it a second chance.
Nope. She said she was working in the sewing factory without benefits and remarried my father to get them.
In retrospect, after learning this, their 2nd divorce was no surprise.
My mom married my stepfather a few years later. After 5 years of tolerating his abuse (mostly verbal), his moodiness (bipolar/major depression likely) and his 23 kids plus 4 exes that he moved in with us, my mother left him.
She rented a Uhaul that day. She hadn’t packed anything nor, as far as I could tell, prepped for the move other than renting an apartment on the other side of the city and asking her friend to drive the truck. On moving day, my sister, me and her friend’s kids loaded the truck with our stuff and we moved out.
A month later, my stepfather visited our shitty apartment to have dinner with us. I was livid because I just knew it meant my mother was going back to him and the abuse and chaos he brought with him. I unfortunately was right. We moved back that weekend.
I never asked my mother why she went back to him until this week. My mother is getting old. Some day, perhaps soon, she’ll be gone. I’ve been thinking about the things I don’t know that only she could shed light on.
So I asked her why she went back to my stepfather.
Her reply was, “I don’t know.”
What?
What do you mean you don’t know? What were you thinking? What were your hopes, your dreams, your concerns, your fears?
I thought I might hear her tell me about love, about financial pressure, about loneliness, about commitment.
I wasn’t expecting “I don’t know” followed by … nothing.
I was stunned. After all, getting married, separated, divorced and back together again are major life events. My mother was only married 3 times and divorced twice (to these two men). Did she really make these decisions so lightly?
I’m sure my mother had her reasons for making these decisions that so dramatically impacted her, me and my sister.
She either doesn’t want to discuss them with me or she’s buried them so deeply that she can’t even think about it.
Either way, I can guess all I want but I’ll never know.