Happy Parents, Happy Life

 I do have a dad.  He died about 31 years ago come June.  My mom has often wondered if maybe she should have stayed married to him and ignored his hatefulness.  She said we might have had been better off financially.  She was feeling frustrated by the price of housing and how we were at a loss financially when my step-dad died.

I told her that our mental health would have been in the gutter if I grew up with him as a dad.  There was a lot of cruelty that went with him.  I consider my step-dad as my dad.  He was really the only dad that I knew since this happened when I was 2 years old.  I saw my dad maybe every 3 or 4 months and it was a relief when he referred to me as an obligation and being done with me.  That's a whole different post for a different day.

I told my mom we would have been ok if you were single and it was just the three of us.  She agreed.  Despite the fact that my step-dad had issues with alcohol, we did something that I don't think we ever did with my dad when we saw him.  We laughed as a family.  Sure, my mom wanted to kill the old boozer, but who didn't?  Long list there.  

Divorce sucks, but parents being unhappy is even suckier.  You feel it.  My mom never said one cross word nor my step-dad when it came to my dad.  She had her moments but she wanted things easier for us.  When you're dealing with someone as difficult as he was, that was a big challenge.  

We would have been ok if my mom was the only parent in our lives, as long as we were all happy.  We get ourselves ingrained with every kid needs a mom and a dad and yes, we do.  We need to have a happy life.  I could feel the strain every time we met up with my dad to do his duty and take us kids for a weekend.  There was no way that we would have been a happy family if she stayed.

There was someone I worked with who could be a bully.  He could be very nice and very funny but when he was mad, he scared me.  I found out from Frick and Frack that he would critique his wife's dinner from the night before.  When I met his wife, she always looked tense.  My mom made peanut butter bars for me to bring to this undeserving person because his wife had surgery.  He gave me a Christmas card and my mom pointed out how tense his wife and daughter looked.  A few years ago, Frick told me that this bully got a divorce.  We found his wife's facebook page and she couldn't have looked happier. I never saw her smile so broadly.  Her kids were in college and it looked like she had her own apartment.  She had her freedom. 

Kids don't want divorce, but we do want our parents to be happy.  When they're happy, we're happy.  Life isn't always so perfect that it has to be a mom and a dad.  We live in an era where our definition of parents has taken on a new meaning with gay couples being parents.  I always wanted Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen as my parents.  I digress. Obviously I'm in a better mood.  I just wanted happy parents.