I pondered about my first story should be about. The idea came to me, like most of my thoughts of substance, in the middle of the night.
I am the result of a marriage of convenience. Both my parents were married once before marrying each other. My father’s first wife died unexpectedly due to complications of the flu. They had a daughter and a son within their thirty-plus years of marriage. My mom was married and divorced. She had discovered her husband and her best friend were having an affair, which was only one of her first husband’s infidelities.
They had several failed attempts to conceive a child. It was suspected that her husband was infertile, but later proven not to be true when his mistress became pregnant.
My dad spent a few lonely years after his wife had died traveling between Florida, which is where his daughter had settled down and had a family, and California, where his son had decided to live once he his run in the Navy ended.
My mom became roommates with a woman who she used to babysit for when she was a teen, who coincidently worked at the same factory as my mom and was looking for someone to help with the mortgage payment. That woman was my father’s youngest sister. So the story unfolds ...
My father was lonely; my mom desperately wanted a child. After a very short courtship, my father proposed, and my mother accepted, with one condition: she wanted a child.
My parents married in June of 1971. I was born in November 1972. My mother was thirty-three; my father was fifty-seven. A twenty-four-year age difference. When my father was twenty-four years old, he was married and had two children. My mother had just entered this world.
From what I was told, my mother was in labor with me for seventy-two hours. She already was three weeks overdue. It didn’t exactly leave her with a very good impression of childbirth. I remember severely hounding my mom for a brother or sister when I around six or seven. I had even suggested that I would “quit school” to help her with the baby. Little did I realize at the time, my father was already in his sixties. When you are a child, your parents are just “Mom and Dad.” Age isn’t something you even give thought to. It wasn’t until I was a little older and I would have kids ask me if my dad was my grandpa that I realized he was older than the dads of other kids my age.
As much as I tried, I didn’t convince my parents to have another baby. So I grew up an only child. It was lonely. Of course, it does have it certain advantages, but I’d trade all the spoiling I had gotten for a sibling or two. I never grew very close with my half-sister and brother. Maybe it would have been different if they hadn’t been so far away while I was growing up. Although, the age gap is not easily ignored.
The age difference my parents shared took its toll on their relationship in the later years. My father slowed down a bit, retired, and my mom had only been in her early forties. I used to overhear them arguing after I had been put to bed at night. As a child, I feared they would divorce, not wanting to choose between the two. They did stay together; however, it was very obvious to me that they were far from happy.
When I was a freshman in high school, my dad had his first heart attack. He was seventy-one. It was discovered once he underwent further tests that he also had lung cancer. He had several treatments of radiation and the outlook was favorable. I was a junior when he had his second heart attack. I had started to dread any calls to the school office, fearing the worst.
