My Mom 1990
You . . . are divorced?
“The concept of marriage based on love is romantic, but somewhat nouveau. That really only started to creep into the public conscience when retailers discovered they could sell it. Marriage was generally practical.
I had already raised five kids and two adults by the time I was twenty. Enough of that! I wanted to pee by myself for once. But I met your father on a bus in Alexandria and sneezed on him. He asked me to stop breathing. How quaint!
He was a smaller man with a suit and eyeglasses. That was fantastic. If you marry a man who is too tall you end up sniffing his armpits and looking up his nose until he dies. He was just right. And he was not a tough guy. I knew a lot of tough men in the old neighborhood. Tough men get killed or go to prison and can’t generally keep much of a job.
He had a suit-job clearly and the sense to wear eyeglasses. I sneezed on him again and lit a cigarette. Women all smoked back then. It was the fashion, stupid really but look at all you girls with tattoos on your face and titties, wait until they dig up your corpse someday!
My husband at the time was frequently beating and raping me, so I decided to play-nice and stub my cigarette when your father coughed. I looked down at the floor of the bus (so did he) when I dropped the cigarette. You could see the cardboard poking out of my shoes.
And he said “Instead of going to dinner we are going to Garfinkel’s to buy you some new shoes.”
A year later we got married. Your father had a plan. He had been working and saving and saving and investing and saving and never ate out and had a Monday Suit and a Tuesday Suit and a Wednesday Suit and his sisters loved him and his parents were so goddamned proud of Eddie because he had paid his way through Tulane.
He wanted two children. My body was in bad bad shape after that first marriage where I was paid to keep that coward out of Vietnam.
I didn’t want any more children to raise. But that is what women had to do back then. It was practical. And it turned into love.
Yet it is always a strange thing to look at your children when they know they were a practical compromise.
It is wonderful to know that women can simply be in love these days, however long it may last.”
-My Mom, 1990
(Reputed) Author’s Note: Women were not getting their breasts tattooed quite so much in 1990. That drop-in passage came along in 2021 when my parents learned that our daughter had permanently scarred her body while ridiculing the practice of smoking. The wording is faithful, give or take a handful of truly filthy expletives. My mom was a wharf rat and proud of it to this day.
