sublingua

The heart with a mind of its own.

(Be present.)

The mind with a heart of its own.

(It's past.)

The dream that is your waking life.

(Go there now.)

Demons #35: Father & #36: Mother
Wednesday, Jun. 02, 2004

Now You're Just Getting Picture Happy, Sublingua.

This little trip down memory lane continues (much to your dismay, I'm sure).

But as long as I'm in the mood, I thought I'd show you my parents.

My parents grew up in the same neighborhood (the very same in which I too grew up), went to the same schools (the same schools I went to), lived a block from each other. My father is a couple of years older than my mother, so they didn't pay the least bit of attention to each other until they were in their teens. They fell in love when my mother was fourteen and my father was sixteen.

Here they are in those early days in the inevitable photo booth photo:

They were married just under a year later. My grandmother--my mother's mother--claims to have been adamantly against their getting married. She withheld her permission for them to do so until she was informed that my mother was pregnant with my older brother. After that little bit of news, it was the old story about closing the barn door after the horse had escaped.

My mother was all of fifteen years old in this photo (and four months pregant with my older brother). My father was seventeen.

My mother once told me this story about her wedding day: The morning she was supposed to marry my father, she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. She had decided that there was no way she was going to get married. Her grandfather (who was her favorite person in the world and the only person in her life who was ever able to convince my teenaged mother to change her mind about anything) came to the bathroom door. He knocked on the door, once, firmly, said to her in Spanish "Come out of there." She came out and was married to my father.

They were married in the little Catholic church down the street from where they (and I) grew up. One of my father's older sisters Maria and her husband Geraldo were their maid of honor and best man. Here they are at the wedding dinner:

After they were married, they lived with my father's parents. My father was the baby of his family, the youngest of six, and his parents were not about to let him move out just because he was starting his own family. They lived--and then we all lived--in the house that my father's father built and where my father grew up.

Here are my parents in the backyard of that house, with the cuartito (the little shed) that my brothers used to jump off the roof of when we were kids. My father was about nineteen and my mother seventeen in this photo.

My parents spent twenty years together, which was a kind of miracle in itself as my father was--and cover your ears if you don't want to hear bad things--an alcoholic and physically abusive. He once beat my mother so badly that she couldn't walk and had to be carried to my grandmother's house, where she lay in bed for a week. When she could walk again, her mother sent her back to my father. You're probably thinking that it was to avoid the embarrassment of a divorced daughter, but that's not it. (My grandmother was twice divorced already when my parents got married.) Rather, it's more likely that my grandmother had decided that her rebellious daughter, in marrying my father, had picked her poison. My grandmother was going to do everything in her power to make sure that she damn well drank it down.

The abuse went on for several years. Finally, my uncle came back from his travels in the military and witnessed the after-effects of a beating that my mother took from my father. My uncle caught my father on the street, took him by the throat, and informed him that if he ever touched his sister again that he was a dead man. And my father was a coward. And the beatings stopped. (He stopped beating her anyway. He stopped beating her but kept drinking.)

Twenty years later, my mother had had enough. One afternoon, she packed only her clothes into her car, told me that she was leaving, asked me if I wanted to come along. I didn't go that afternoon, but shortly after that, I did follow her.

So those are my parents. I hope that they were happy for a time anyway.

retreat or surrender

More lies:
Waking Sleeping Demons II - Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011
Waking Sleeping Demons - Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
time - Friday, May. 20, 2011
- - Wednesday, Oct. 06, 2010
The Return - Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010

� sublingua sublingua.diaryland.com.