Many events before I arrived in the city of Papa as a member of the 1% relative to Papa's average incomes, I jumped ship. After years of mucking away at a job at an educational corporation, I broke down and realized that I needed to go write my books. This was a near impossibility at the job. So, I stopped being a responsible adult and risked, well, all of it.
I made a cliched move back home, to live my parents. And there I had a rare chance to live as an adult with the adults who shaped me and to watch their post-child-raising lives up close. My parents have a good marriage, by any standard; and like all good marriages that last more than 40 years, theirs is complicated and private and it's meant to stay that way. Papa and I were sitting the barn talking. The barn is where the real talking happens with my dad. He's all set up with a fridge, a TV, a work bench, saw horses, blow torch, massive tool box, shop vac, the whole kit. He rebuilds cars in his retirement. I do a lot of cleaning small parts of engines when I'm there. And talking. I wasn't home a week when he said, "While you live here, you will do no marriage counseling."
He's fond of pronouncements.
That are not always followed.
At least not to the letter. Because I did do some mom-counseling. I realize this is a loop hole, but it seemed necessary. Here I am with my two best friends on the planet, and in the course of respecting them, their world, and our relationship, I couldn't follow the letter the law. Friends tell friends the truth, sometimes the hard truth.
I learned that there are basically two kinds of long marriages. There's the happy but melancholic marriage, the one my parents have, in which they do wonderful things for each other and are fabulous companions. The big Christmas present this year from Mamma to Papa was a warmly lined flannel shirt to replace the "Deliverance" shirt dad had been wearing for y e a r s and y e a r s and which was getting to ratty looking even for him. Problem, these shirt-coats had fallen out of fashion. Mamma hunted high and low, and bang!, found it. This shirt had become a symbol, a symbol of my father's rebellion against all formalities he deemed unnecessary (there are many, mostly to do with dress and hair cuts), and my mother's desire to appear in public from time to time with a smartly dressed man. Mom still believes in a number of formalities, so ok. Papa bought Mamma a massage table. This too is a symbol, in this case of the basic underlying intimacy and contentment they have and that has always held them together. But, let's say, Pops is taking it to a new level. The melancholic element though is this:
They have the same fight, in slight variations, on a nearly seasonal cycle.
Hence the mom-counseling. Papa wouldn't discuss it with me. And he told me it's not that he thought I would not have good advice, or that I would take sides. He thought that it's just not my business. And it's not. Until Mamma says, "I want some advice about your dad."
Now, I will not tell you the substance of the fight. That's clearly not mine to tell. What I will say is that this fight is the one place, the one, where they both failed, over and over again. It was the one place/issue/thing about which neither of them could ever learn to be generous. It was the one matter about which they both wanted the other person to change and the other person could or would not change. No way, no how. What this means is that every few months, for a week or so, they're both pissy and defensive and mad at each other for The Same Thing Again.
This got on my nerves. But I learned a thing. I learned that to have the other kind of good marriage, the one that bears less of the odor of melancholy, what we need is to learn a generosity that has no limit. The change they both needed sums up this way: one wanted total acceptance and other wanted more order. I know why and where those needs come from in my parents, but that's none of your business. What's important is that this is a tough nut to crack, so I understand how this conflict became a theme, a refrain. Neither wanted or wants something that would damage the other, so the two desires are perfectly fine--they just don't match. This where the generosity comes into play, that long lived love is a thing humans do in order to chafe off parts of our selves that we don't really need, or don't need all the time. And that's where the generosity would come it, that's what would smooth the chafe.
I think. I'm going to have to live a good while longer to find out.
