by Sandra Lowen

Created on: September 17, 2009

WHEN YOU LOVE MR. WRONG

"Love is blind, deaf, dumb, and stupid," my mom always said. She was an expert on that. She didn't have much luck with my dad, for sure.

Theirs was a 'Some Enchanted Evening' meeting. Pop would pontificate on it, usually very, very late at night, when nostalgia hit hard and anything wet passed for wine. "I saw her across a crowded dance floor," he would say. "Slender as a willow, golden skin, jet black braids as thick as her arms. She smelled like perfume in my embrace. I followed her home and I loved her. It was two weeks before I got that gnawing feeling in the back of my head to come into focus: I was married already and had a four-year-old boy."

Poor Mom! He vacated her bed in a rush, and high-tailed back to his 'real' life. When she found herself with child, she and her mother hunted him down, coming upon him at dinner with his wife and his son and his in-laws and his bossy brother. Ultimately, his wife forsook him to find a man who didn't have lapses of memory, and he wound up with Mom and her infant son.

Pop was a good-looking man, but he didn't have a whole lot of ambition. Nowadays, one would probably say he had a fear of failure, but the reality was probably closer to his self-description that he was a lazy bum. He ignored the bulletins on the board at his work, offering opportunities for advancement and extra training, and stuck to what he knew. Mom settled two more of us in the world and endured a tiny apartment and threadbare clothes, while her friends sported apartments uptown and even fine homes, and new clothes every season.

Maybe things would have worked out for them, but there were a few situations that ensured that wouldn't happen. First, there was the religion thing. Mom was Catholic, and really should never have taken up with a divorced Protestant. It didn't help that he not only wouldn't convert for her sake, but spent many a Sunday afternoon teasing her about being an idol-worshiper because of her statues. Nor could she attend services at his church. To do so was a sin; venial or mortal, she could never remember. It didn't matter. She couldn't have her white lace wedding for any number of reasons, the chief one being that she couldn't marry him. The day they became legally married, her mother always reminded her, she would be excommunicated from the Faith. Precisely what happened! She wound up only able to take Novena, though the priest sometimes sneaked communion out to her on the stairs.

Then, Pop took to drinking.

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