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Blogs by Dorien Grey
"Mom and Dad"
9/14/2009 3:31:41 AM
A brief reflection on the people who gave us the gift of life.
***
From Dorien Grey and Me (http://www.doriengreyandme.com)
Our parents give us birth and shape our lives, and leave us with a debt we can never fully repay --or, tragically for a very few, with scars that can never be healed. I was infinitely blessed with the former.
I know you have/had your own folks, and your own memories, but I really wish you had known mine: you’d have liked them, I’m sure. Dad’s been dead 41 years now, Mom 39, something I can say, but sincerely cannot comprehend. My parents are still alive in my mind and heart, every day of my life.
There’s no way I could cram 38 years worth of the warmth and love and happiness and sorrow I experienced with them into one blog entry, or a thousand; the three of us are as interwoven as the threads in a blanket. But I’d like to give you just the quickest of sketches of them, if I could.
Neither of them graduated from high school. They met and married in 1929; mom was two years older than dad. That they ever got together, or stayed together, is something of a miracle. Mom’s family, the Fearns, could have stepped out of the pages of a book on the All-American Family, even though Grandma Fearn was born in Norway. Think of a Norman Rockwell painting, and you’ve pretty much got it.
Dad’s family, the Margasons, was a study in dysfunction. His parents divorced when he was quite small, with the result that he spent some time in an orphanage, an event which left its own deep scars. His mother remarried several times. Margason family reunions inevitably ended in near brawls as members rehashed the same old real and perceived wrongs they’d rehashed at the previous reunion and would at the next one.
Both my parents worked hard all their lives. My mom held down a full-time job and managed to care for me and Dad and the house at the same time. Dad, I fear, was of the old school, in that cleaning, cooking, and housework were woman’s work, and Mom did it without complaint. (I remember distinctly that Mom always buttered Dad’s toast for him, and that she always took great pains to see that not one quarter inch of the surface was left unbuttered.)
Please don’t get me wrong, Dad wasn’t a tyrant: he was simply a man of his time, and that’s just the way things were. He was also, regrettably, something of a womanizer, which of course deeply hurt my mother. They fought (verbally) constantly and at one point Mom and I moved briefly out of our house to another small one my folks owned. They really, really should have divorced, but they didn’t. Mom loved Dad too much, and he loved her in his own way. In the last three years of his life, they grew much closer, and both were the happier for it.
The recognition of one's parents as being individual human beings apart from being "Mom" and "Dad" is, I've always held, the point at which one truly steps from childhood to adulthood. Mine were far from perfect: they were simply average, flawed human beings who did the very best they could. And despite my momentary fear of being sent to an orphanage (a threat my father made on a couple of occasions when I was particularly incorrigible and without really realizing that, since I was just a child, I did not know he didn't mean it), and my numerous other self-imposed insecurities, I never had the slightest doubt that both my parents loved me more than anything else in the world. Dad tried very very hard to fit his own mental image of what a father should be, and I’m afraid I far too often treated him very badly. I would give the world if I could only go back and undo some of those hurts…but as you have noticed, life doesn’t work that way.
It was my mom, primarily, who gave me my love of words. She loved to read: O’Henry, Mark Twain, and Guy de Maupassant were her favorites. She had a great sense of humor and a surprisingly deep laugh for a woman of her size (5'2"). I don’t recall Dad reading much, but then I don’t think reading exactly fit his idea of what a real man should be. He worked. Work was what men do.
When I think back now on just how deeply and completely my father loved me, though he found it so hard to express other than by being what he saw as his “Father” persona, I truly ache with regret.
Dad died of a heart attack (his second within six or eight months), when he was 57 years old. Mom died a horrible and lingering death—partly because I refused to let her go when I should have told the doctors to stop treatment—from lung cancer at the age of 62. I have never forgiven myself for that, and never will. I am now 19 years older than my father and 14 years older than my mother. Incomprehensible.
Should you wonder why I thought you might have any interest at all in people you never met, the primary reason for writing this blog is to establish a bridge between us, in hopes that we can meet in the middle of that bridge and, together, look down and watch our similar reflections in the waters of time.
***
There'll be another entry posted here next Monday, and I hope you'll come back. In the meantime, you're invited to visit my website or drop me a note at doriengrey.att.net.
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