So I realized yesterday after I hit published that I had failed to mention the most important news of my day, that my mom and her husband of twenty-three years are separating. She texted me yesterday asking for ten minutes of my time, so I called her and she broke the news. Now I’ve never been close to my step-father, so much so that I didn’t even call him my step-father until a year or two ago. I was eighteen when they got together, living with my mom in an apartment when she told me she was moving in with him, and that I needed to find my own place.
I didn’t really see them all that much after that. They had a house about twenty minutes away and then moved three hours away a few years after that, where they’ve been living for some time. My brother lived with them for a few years after he graduated high school, before taking a job in Germany.
My stepdad is a nice guy, but like I said, we were never close. We shared some interest in investing and finance, I tried to get him into crypto, but I don’t think he ever did. Anyways, now my mom is telling me that he’s moving out but still wants to continue to see the girls. I don’t know how that’s going to work. Awkwardly, most likely.
This is all against the backdrop of my brother coming home from Germany for the first time in seven years. We were trying to arrange our weekend with them, and were hoping to crash at my mom’s. My dad was hoping to fly out my eighty-year old grandmother as well, but I don’t even know how that’s going to work now. We’ll figure it out.
Appropriately enough, I wound up listening to a bit of this lecture by Alan Watts, on the divine madness known as falling in love. He gets into it about romantic marriage being a recent historical anomaly, and how basing this type of long-term contract on something resembling temporary insanity is well… a bit insane itself. I’ve always been conflicted about the idea of staying married for ever. There’s enough social science on the subject out there, mainly my doubts are around what Watts terms the monotony of monogamy, but I’ll leave that for now.
I used to make jokes (Why is divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it. What’s the number one cause of divorce? Marriage.) to my boys when we were hanging out, but someone in SAIA announced they were getting one after a decade or two and they were obviously hung up about it and it wasn’t the right tone to set. No such jokes with my mom either. I think the fact that Missus and I are going on our twelfth year married might have something to do with it as well. I’m not sure whether each additional year together increases or decreases our chances of staying together, but we’ve passed the seven year itch. The average marriage in the States is eight and a half years, so we might be doing ok.