I don't have many childhood memories from before the divorce of my parents. My very first real, complex memories consisting of more than just momentary flashes of color, feeling, fleeting sensation or glimpses of fading images are those of the time right when my parents were splitting up.
Those first few memories that I retain reflect a child trying to piece together the scenario of separation with lapses of naive hopeless hope for a reconciliation. I'm thankful for the fact that my mind didn't let me keep everything that happened, only a few memories as parts of the complete narrative of my childhood.
I am six years old. I am in front of the last house that my parents lived in together. The house at the edge of the cul-de-sac, the house in front of the scary man's house with the ribs that jutted out, who always smoked cigarettes and who didn't like us playing in his yard. This was the house where my mother told my father she would never move to another house with him again. She was sick of his social ineptitude, his failed business ideas, his uprooting his family every time the wind changed, trying to make a buck off the equity. These are the things I know about, the reasons I was given later in life, the filtered data.
In my memory it's raining and I'm playing in the hot Arizona rain. I'm barefoot on the sidewalk and the sun has gone down and I look down and see giant raindrops. They are oddly huge, and they ingrain themselves into my mind and the fragrant rain melds with the smell of oil on hot asphalt.
Just over at the porch of my house my parents sit watching the rain, and I'm happy that they are sitting together on those fold-up chairs we take to the lake sometimes on Sundays. Likely they were discussing divorce minutiae such as who would call the phone company to get the line turned off and when would be a good time to go to the bank to close their joint account, when would be a good time to tell the kids.
In another memory, I come out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to find my parents calmly packing their things into separate boxes. They are talking like nothing is wrong, having accepted the way things are now and just having the task of transmitting that acceptance to their children.
My mom holds up some sort of Native American dreamcatcher and asks my dad if she can have it. He says "yeah", shrugging.
No tears right now, just the packing of separate boxes for two separate houses to distribute divided, mismatched things within; things that used to fill just one house. Most of the things belonged to my father, whose well-to-do grandmother had died allowing him to inherit some of her nice things, like a set of China and a classical oak bedroom set. Eventually he decided he didn't care about China and let my mother keep it, but he needed the bedroom furniture for his new apartment in Albuquerque. No matter that the bedroom set would never fit in his tiny bedroom. It wouldn't have fit in my mother's new tiny apartment either.
In another memory, the family is in the car on our way to a restaurant. I see my parents in the front seat. I can't see them clearly, just the shapes of their heads over the seats, but there is palpable sorrow between them and maybe they are even holding hands. My mom doesn't think we kids are paying attention and says quietly to my father that this is probably our last meal together as a family.
In the restaurant we sit at a round table. My parents pay attention to stupid things like if we are sitting in our chairs properly and if we are eating our vegetables. But tonight, for some reason, we're allowed to have another Shirley Temple and order dessert instead of waiting until we get home for Otter Pops.
In the parking lot after the kids are buckled in the back I look out the window and see my parents embracing; just the behavior that fill a six-year-old heart with that desperate, naive, and hopeless hope.
These are not memories of explosive arguments, abusive shouting, spiteful jabs of hate thrown at each other with ugly words hissed through closed teeth with clenched fists. Those things undoubtedly happened, but I don't recall them. These are just memories of two people that cared about each other but had failed at love, time and time again, and eventually gave in.
There is nothing so sad as watching your parents fail at love.
Well, except maybe watching yourself fail at it.
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