Decree

1.20.08

Searching under my desk this morning, I came across a box of pink typewriter paper my sister had sent when packing up my mother’s house shortly after her death. For some reason, she had decided it was worthy of adding to the shipment of things I had requested from our split of the inherited items. Family linens, a hand painted hutch, an upholstered chair and this box. Which I had ignored for years until yesterday when seeking some lost attachment for my phone. My daughter was with me on a sunny Sunday and I thought she would enjoy the contents for her many art projects. She delighted in the gift and then I discovered an old envelope inside marked “Divorce.” I lifted out the yellow pack so she could sort through the rosy sheets and unfolded first a legal document in Spanish and then its translation in English.

My parents had divorced when I was 6 and I had once before seen a document amongst my mother’s files. I had no memory of my parents together but had cobbled together a story based on impressions from friends and what I knew of these 2 people as I grew up. Neither had been able to speak about each other much nor could they be in the same room, so I had learned to love them on their own terms and turf. My father had married the nanny he had impregnated while my mother was traveling with my sister and me one summer and my mother supposedly had been having an affair with the nanny’s father but gone to a doctor in NJ to end her own pregnancy.

Divorce in the early 60’s was not what it is today and I had imagined that she, upon discovery of my father’s infidelity, had instigated the proceedings. She never spoke to my sister and me about what had happened so we floated back and forth between the 2 worlds of very different people. When my father died, my mother called herself a “widow” on a graduate school application I had filled out and my heart went out to her. Somewhere inside I knew she had never gotten over him, but it had been over 20 years and 2 of his marriages since their separation when he died and I was surprised at her reaction. She died 4 years later and when my sister and I put things away in her home to prepare for summer renters, we largely ignored any paperwork not directly related to her estate.

I have now been married 18 years, with 2 children, and understand the pains of marriage in a way I couldn’t have growing up with a single mother who never again lived with a man. Divorce now claims half of all marriages and my kids seem to treat it like another lifestyle choice, with their friends shuttling about between parents and their new partners and families like hockey pucks. Parents are in constant contact via phone, email, txt messaging and chats about their children’s schedules and often share vacations and family outings along with the requisite school performances, sports events, medical visits and even therapy sessions. But for me growing up, divorce looked like the pained face my mother wore whenever she had to speak to my father by phone. It looked like my father’s slight remove at the doorstep when he came to pick us up for visits. Their separate lives were as different as the décor in their two homes and the distance between them miles greater than the 20 blocks expanse from house to house. The only time I remember them in the same space for longer than a minute was at my college graduation and they could barely look at each other.

My mother had an amazing wit and a way with words that could just as easily cut like a scalpel as delight with humorous stories and intellectual parrying. I later learned that, with only a high school degree, she had always felt somewhat inferior to my PhD. bearing father, and was uncomfortable with his peer group. I could believe a friend of hers who said she would often step on his ego in order to boost her own. But I had also understood that my father had in his own passive aggressive way left photos of him and the nanny, naked in their bed, for my mother to find on her bedside table. So my understanding of her asking him to leave due to his infidelity made sense.

Finding this document was therefor no surprise. What took me in and turned me around was learning that it was not my mother filing for divorce from her philandering husband but he from her for “mental cruelty.” Further delving into the paper work revealed also the divorce decree from her first husband. Again, to my surprise, I learned that he had filed against her for the same reason: “Mental cruelty during their married life.”

As a teenager, I had learned by mistake, from my father, that she had been married before him and that there had been money troubles. I could imagine that this marriage had ended because she wanted more than her local boyfriend from Wyoming could offer in their new haunt in NYC. I could see her larger than life spirit falling in love with this new city after a life in the mid-west and how she might have wished for something more lavish. I had heard as well that my mother had fallen for my farther partly because of his wealth and social status, and then been disappointed that he didn't have as much interest in either as she had. So, twice her needs had been un-met and perhaps she had twice reacted in less than gracious ways. But "cruel?" I bristled at the word. It seemed too harsh, hopefully just a legal term from the pre "no-fault" days. Yet, a small part of this word resonated and I did not want to remember, that yes, I too had received her caustic looks and acid words. I had felt just as cut down by her as older friends had attested to. I did not want to admit that, despite their own failings, my father and her first husband may have had good reason to leave my mother.

By now, tears were streaming down my face and my daughter had looked up and matter of factly stated, “well, I guess I’ll be going now.” She left me alone in my office with 2 pieces of thin parchment paper, the carefully guarded documents of love twide gone sour nearly 50 years ago. I thought of my father, a man I held dear in my heart for his gentle spirit and his refusal to speak meanly of anyone and how I had thought he fell prey to the young nanny for the adoring look in her eyes. I wondered how my mother could not have delighted in his love, but then remembered too that he was not perfect and that I had never been married to him. I imagined too, a high school love, idyllic with dreams of the big city and how small her first husband might have felt next to her beauty and huge appetite. Yes, it made as much sense that they would have left her for their real or imagined unmet needs as she would have left them for hers.

So, what does it mean now, that my mother was left, not the leave-er? Did I learn that men leave for good reason, rather than are asked to go when they fail? My own marriage has suffered perhaps from unspoken scripts being re-enacted by unwitting players. Since year one and his extra-marital affair, I have had dreams of my own husband leaving and now it turns out I may be the one to go after my own straying 17 years later. When someone looks outside a marriage, there is usually some distress they are trying to shake off. Whether my mother’s “cruelty” caused my father’s affair or vice versa or her dissatisfaction with the small town boy she had first married had been acted out with unkindness seems less relevant. I’m not sure it matters who leaves or why. What lingers is the legacy left behind for 2 daughters, one still single at mid-life, who never found ease in their own couplings and who perhaps learned to push away the ones they have loved before ever feeling the life-long pain of being left themselves.