I’ve heard my wife tell the story a handful of times over the twenty-plus years of our marriage. I am always moved by it, or more accurately, I identify strongly with it. It is a story of leaving your family behind too soon; not as a choice but because staying would be even more painful. These endings aren’t the slightly bumpy transitions that occur in healthy families, like when a teenager goes off to college and hides the pain of separation behind an exterior of cool remove.
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No, these are like explosions that propel us into painful trajectories, too young, too soon and with too much pain. The reverberations last well beyond their initial occurrence. My family ended when my father answered our challenge of getting sober by telling us to go fuck ourselves and get out of his house. In the heat of that moment, my father and I came to blows. I still carry the burden of that night.
No, these are like explosions that propel us into painful trajectories, too young, too soon and with too much pain.
My wife grew up in Georgetown in Washington D.C. until her mother and father inexplicably uprooted her and her five sisters into farm country deep in the sticks of Maryland. She was fifteen, a city kid, with deep connections to her high school and many friends. She loved the funkiness of 1970’s Georgetown.
Her relationship with her father was deeply estranged before the move. He was a difficult man who showed little positive interest in his daughters in general and my wife in particular. He would occasionally wake them all in the middle of the night to pick nuggets of dirt out of their bedroom rug. His anger was often out of any disernable context, leaving my wife with the desire to become invisible to him. His presence created a constantly-held tension and fear within her.
“I don’t know what’s next I only know I can’t stay here a second more.”
Eventually, it all came to a head. My wife’s mother sobbing over her insistence on leaving and her father making it known that if she left the farm she would be on her own. She was all of 16 years old but more than anything else she was done. Finally, resolutely, with full conviction and beyond any doubt.
This is the part of the story I most identify with having reached the exact same place and feeling with my own family: “I don’t know what’s next I only know I can’t stay here a second more.” My wife moved back to Georgetown and au-paired for a while, couch surfed with friends, worked in a restaurant and eventually graduated from high school.
I have known and dated women that are beautiful, intelligent and desirable but my feelings for them stopped just short of love, or at least the kind of love that allowed me to make a deeper commitment. There was nothing wrong with these women or me, there was just some intangible element lacking between us.
Not so with my wife. We met long before we were lovers and fear of intimacy is what kept us apart. The flame threw too much heat. I felt a deep physical attraction to her, her green eyes, full lips and energy, certainly but there was another strong awareness I had. When I was with her it felt like home, in the best sense of the word, the place I was meant to be, the place where I could be myself fully and completely. There was also an intuitive connection between us.
When I was with her it felt like home, in the best sense of the word, the place I was meant to be.
From the emotional and sometimes physical lash of our fathers and the detonation of our original families we forged a bond of understanding and then set out together to make a family that was cohesive; where nobody could be cast out. Home being more that a house but a place of refuge, compassion and understanding. There are differences there, sometimes sharp ones, but we strive to settle them and sooner or later, we do. This family has healed us beyond all expectation.
Nobody can say what the future holds and how we may be tested as a family, but I know I am dedicated to my wife and children. I will give them all I have without doubt or hesitation and only through death will we part.
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