My parents’ wedding anniversary is a date—it was this week—that always pops into my consciousness with alarming clarity. My parents are divorced, haven’t been together since I was eight. So, isn’t it interesting that this date has such a firm hold within me?
For many years, when I was much younger, I would often find myself—around the anniversary—staring intently at photographs of them together or of their wedding. I’d wonder about what ifs, such as what if they’d stayed together? Or what if they’d never been married?
Maybe that’s the reason the parents’ anniversary maintains significance for the child; without it, there’s that sense of potential nonexistence. For that reason, too, however bad the union may or may not have been, I feel right around this time of year, fortunate about their marriage having taken place, despite all the obvious rest of it (like, it wasn’t a great or enduring marriage).
My parents do not—and never did—have a peaceful divorce, in the Molly Monet form of it. Molly writes a terrific blog with a stellar title Postcards of a Peaceful Divorce and she lives one, complete with family dinners, shared Thanksgiving and ease about the daily experience of growing a family—she and her ex have two great kids—that happens to reside in two households. She writes (and lives) with humor and affection about seeing the whole thing—the love they shared, the deep friendship/kinship and co-parenting-ship they continue to share—as a glass half-full experience. Perhaps, part of what resonates for the child of divorce within me is how by seeing it all that way, she reaffirms her gladness that everything happened as it did, producing that particular pair of (trust me on this one, fabulous) kids.
**
But the anthem of my week isn’t about wishful thinking and idealized outcomes, it’s more rock-n-roll, the Stones’ way: You can’t always get what you want… But if you try sometime, you get what you need.
We’ve had some gigantic, dinosaur-claw machines smack in front of our house putting in new sewer pipes to replace what was broken. Quite obviously, had anyone asked me about what I wished for before the whole water crisis of December 2010 occurred I would not have said freaking huge machinery—too big, I was told, but the right-size equipment’s out on another job—in front of my house tearing up the street and literally causing the house to reverberate. Nah. But hey, having this lovely crew (seriously, I baked them muffins, that kind of endearing) restore order to our world—reminding us we need things we overlooked and remembering to acknowledge we need ‘em—feels like not only what I need, but somehow, what I want. Regardless of what I thought I wanted. Not the literal experience, necessarily, but the lesson.
Kelle Hampton, whose gorgeous photographs of her blond girls and their postcard-perfect lives in Florida, is another of those self-professed half-full bloggers. I may never have encountered her blog, Enjoying the Small Things had she not given birth just about a year ago to a daughter, Nella, with Down syndrome. Hampton wrote a very honest post (that went viral) about giving birth, discovering her daughter’s DS diagnosis, and breaking down—before she resolved otherwise. She returns often to this theme: how she had no idea and couldn’t have wanted things the way they are and sometimes worries about all the what-will-happen-next questions, yet has not only what she needs, but what she wants.
Life doesn’t always feel that way. When it does, though, gaping holes in your street or whatever else, embrace it.
