They Look Like They're Playing Dress Up

My parents’ 40th wedding anniversary is this coming Sunday. She was nineteen and he was twenty, and while so many kids were off to Woodstock or college or Vietnam (the army wouldn’t take my dad because he has stupid feet like mine—thank God), my parents were getting married and going to work. He was a Journeyman in a machine shop, perfecting his skills as a tool and dye maker, and she was working in a sewing factory. She sewed the bridesmaid’s hideous yellow dresses herself, the reception was in my dad’s parents’ yard and garage, and they spent their honeymoon night in a motel about twenty minutes out of town.

They started dating when she was sixteen, and she’s never been with another guy. She doesn’t romanticize it—she’s told me more than once that she was desperate to escape her (mean, drunk, controlling) father’s house, and that she knew my dad was a nice, solid, steady man. She was certainly right about that. Her father didn’t attend the wedding (in fact, she didn’t see him after that until I was born about a year and a half later, on his birthday), but her brother came home from Vietnam to give her away.

So they pretty much got married as kids, lived with my dad’s parents for a while (tiny house, my Slovak immigrant grandparents and my dad’s three younger siblings, terrible cooking, non-stop polkas on the kitchen radio, and lots and lots of church), and then bought their own little two bedroom house—the house we all lived in until my little sister was two—for $8,000. Judging from some old photos and their sheepish reminiscences, there were lots of parties in that tiny house. Lots of motorcycles, lots of pot smoke and beer, lots of music, and a lot of happiness. My mom’s sisters and cousins and their boyfriends and eventual husbands all hung out there all the time, as did my dad’s friends and brothers. I had no end of attention from all of these young hippie types, and I loved being the star of the show until my wretched pest of a sister came along when I was about three and a half. (She had the nerve to be born on a night we were supposed to be going to the drive-in—I can clearly remember my mom’s water breaking as she came down the front porch stairs, which caused me to dance around singing, “Mommy peed her pa-ants! Mommy peed her pa-ants!”)

So my parents had two kids, a dog, a house, and an ever-changing stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles by the time they were 24 and 25. Money was tight and my mom was lonely and bored, so she fought my dad tooth and nail to convince him that it would be a good thing for her to go to school to get her nursing degree. He hated the idea. Hated it! Mothers were supposed to stay home, as his did—my paternal grandmother never even had a driver’s license! But she did it. She worked as a nurse’s aid while taking classes at the community college to become an RN, and then took classes at a branch campus of the state university to eventually earn her BSN while I was in college myself.

Their marriage had some tough times. He hated that she worked and went to school, and that her schedule actually kept her from church on Sundays AND saw her doing laundry and housework on Sundays—a double whammy, and very serious affronts to his Super Catholicism. He did little to help her, because he didn’t know or care how to do much in the way of housework—he had been raised with certain expectations, and was reluctant to change.

She met lots of new and interesting people, and I am almost positive there was a doctor who cared for her a great deal and wanted her to be more than friends. I was pretty sure when I was eleven or twelve that they were going to get divorced, and I found that I was okay with the idea for the most part, because I really wanted my mom to be happy, but I was sad for my dad, who I knew would never eat anything other than hot dogs and scrambled eggs, and who wouldn’t think to decorate for Christmas.

They got through it, though. And through a few more rough patches. Forty years, two kids, many pets and friends, two grandsons, one daughter’s divorce (hi!), the deaths of all of their parents but my mom’s mom, and they’re still going strong. They’re too used to each other to not be together forever. And if you prodded them, they’d probably even admit that they love each other a whole lot.

So . . . Happy Anniversary to them! Let’s hope we can throw them a huge-ass fancy party for their 50th!