The Secret Lives of Parents

You might think that you want to know every little thing about your parents – but are you sure about that?  If you do, then you'd better get ready for whatever comes out in the wash, because death can often churn everything up and spit it out in ways you least expect... 

While it's true that some parents might have led lives that resemble the proverbial house with a white picket fence – no dark corners, no layers of paint to peel back that reveal other stories of other lives and situations lived long ago – that wasn't the case with my parents.  When my mother died,  long withheld anger felt by my father suddenly and without warning came to the surface.  It sounded like my mother might have had an affair at some point, and in his grief over her death, love and empathy turned into anger and resentment.  Friends of theirs suddenly came forth talking about how they probably "never really loved each other", due to "all the things that happened between them."  The friends thought that I surely must have known about all of this, but nothing could have been further from the truth.  I was completely in the dark, and I now faced things that I wasn't sure I wanted to know.  What I did know was that my father wasn't a very understanding or loving person, and it wasn't hard to understand that if my mother did, in fact, have an affair, it might have been out of a genuine need for, and lack of, love and affection.  As I stated in my book, Feet First, I was the reluctant witness to the fact that their lovemaking lasted a total of a few minutes at most...

Children who find out information like this might react differently.  My brother refused to believe it, thinking that the tirades spewing from my father, that both my wife and I witnessed, were more or less just figments of our imagination.  But I had seen a lot of tension between my parents, and to me the revelations of my mother's affair weren't so unthinkable.  After my mother's death,  when I admonished my father to stop berating her, he said, "Maybe I was just a flop in bed!"  If my wife and I weren't sure about the affair before,  his response said it all...

The bottom line (I hate that phrase, but it seems fitting in this context) was that I actually didn't want to know.  It was their business, not mine, and I neither loved my father more nor my mother less.  I understood both points of view, but my own mindset is what prevailed: Private means private, even if it's your parents...