Today marks a milestone of sorts in my life. Well, not really so much a milestone as a realization.
You see, thirty-eight years ago tonight, I was eighteen years old. Not just eighteen years old, but eighteen years old and embarking on a journey. I was getting ready to walk down the aisle and get married to the poor guy wearing a white tux...and we were both making a huge mistake.
Back in the dark ages it was social poison to be pregnant and unmarried. And yet, I found myself in what my mother called "that predicament". Because I was in "that predicament," and because we wanted to do the "right" thing, we got married. He was still in college, I'd just graduated from high school, and we had less than no money to live on. We scraped by, and depended on family to help us out in the no-we-can't-afford-groceries times.
When the baby was just a few months old, we left him with my parents so that we could scope out a job opportunity in Kentucky. We drove out there, only to find that the manager of the store he was supposed to work at lived worse than we did. He quit and we moved back home.
Three years later we were divorced.
I never regretted having the baby...in fact, he was and is one of the joys of my life. What I do regret are the circumstances surrounding his birth and the breakup of that marriage.
It's hard to admit failure, and even harder to admit you failed at a marriage. That's one thing I'll always carry with me...one thing I'll never forget.
Today we're both married to others, and much happier than we would have been married to each other. I was still a child in a woman's body when it all happened. He was immature as well, and we both acted out of propriety rather than a forever kind of love for each other. I'm not saying that divorce is a good thing. Don't get me wrong there. But it clearly was the only option in our case.
Even so, thirty-eight years is a long, long time to remember.
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