My husband started watching a special tonight on Nostradamus and Isaac Newton. I wasn't really paying attention - those "end of the world" theories aren't my thing - but my daughter asked my husband about us being related to Sir Isaac. It's a family legend, can't really be entirely true since he apparently had no children, but it started me thinking about my father's side of the family. Depending on the day I either sort of choose not to think about it, or I'm fascinated by this group of people who I really know nothing about, when it comes right down to it.
My parents separated when I was very young. My father moved to the United States when I was so young that I don't even know exactly how old I was. Younger than five, certainly. My memories are of being picked up after school by a man I barely knew, taken to visit his mother and step (adoptive) father for the evening, then taken back home to my mom. I'd get a phone call on Christmas Day, one on my birthday, and then the next year it would happen all over again.
It's not that uncommon a scenario today. I can only remember two other of the kids I went to school with in elementary school having divorced parents. My father was also a child of divorce, though, and if it was uncommon when I was young, it was almost unheard of when he was. Still, I remember hating when my teachers would say it was time to do a Father's Day art project. I'd do it anyway, knowing that it would go in the trash when I was done. Once a teacher suggested that I make something for my mom instead. I was so embarrassed. Truth is, though, that most of the time I didn't notice that my life was any different than everyone else's. I didn't know life with two parents. Even now the idea of my parents together seems ludicrous.
But I think that makes that side of my family seem all the more mysterious. My father's mother passed away last year. I read her eulogy, which she had ironically written herself for a course she was doing, and reading her recollections of her life I was hit again by the realization of how little I knew about her, really, and how I wish we'd had a better relationship that had enabled her to tell me them herself, so that I could have asked questions. No one did, really, ask her those questions, I don't think. So, I imagine what it must have been like. I imagine what must have caused her to make the decisions that she did, good and bad. I wonder what made her the person that she was, and, in the end, how she made my father the man that he is.
I'm very glad that my children have the father that they do. Every once in a while, watching them play together, or cuddle, I mourn that relationship that never was, but most of the time it just makes me happy to see the people that I love most in the world loving each other. Sir Isaac Newton, for all of his genius and fame, had nothing on that.
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