Possibility

“All the time I was growing up … I wanted to live on an island with two (two!) parents who were best friends.  Now that’s where I live, only I’m the parent, living with my husband, who has turned out to be my best friend.  God only knows what my own children will grow up wishing for, but I profoundly hope they get it, at least for a while, at least eventually.”

                                                      ~ Claire Dederer, Poser

Lately I am aware how much the light of my marriage exists in the shadow of my parents’ divorce. 

I am months away from turning 40, the seismic age that signified the implosion of family as I knew it.  This is how my younger self recorded that year, its seasons seemingly snapped in half:  My mom had a surprise fortieth birthday party in the spring.   My dad moved out of the house that fall.

Every family has its physics, waves of actions and reactions spilling across generations.  At the time my parents divorced, I was so intent on varnishing a veneer of goodness – good daughter, good student, good all-around emotional anchor – that I don’t remember allowing myself to think about what was possible in a family.  I only knew what was impossible.

Over the weekend, the passage from the epilogue of Claire Dederer’s powerful memoir, Poser, pulled me from the page, into memory and back again.  “Listen to this,” I said to Derek, who was nose-to-iPad on the couch.  

I read to him, but it felt like I was reading across the channel of my 17-year marriage to my younger self.  Promising her that what she wanted from her parents she would be able to create for herself.  On this island with this surprising man, a husband and father who stays and sparks the sustenance of possibility.