Like many adolescents, I used to riffle through my parents’ drawers and closets. It wasn’t that I was so curious about my parents’ “other” life — the one that went on behind the closed doors of their bedroom. Most kids can barely fathom that their parents actually have a life, let alone a sex life, nor do they much care to know. But there were things in my parents’ room, sexual things, and since I was on the cusp of womanhood, I was hungry for any information I could get about this thing called “sex.”
During times when the house was empty, I often made visits to their bedroom to flip through the pages of the artsy erotica books placed casually on their bookshelves and the Playboy magazines someone had taken care to “hide” under the bed. But one day I was bold enough to open a nightstand drawer and was shocked to find condoms and packets of the Pill — were my parents were still having sex? After I got over the “eww” factor I forged on only to discover something much more shocking — a Polaroid photo of a naked male body part, obviously belonging to my father. I shoved it back in the drawer, jammed it shut and ran out of their room, my heart beating wildly.
Although that photo was TMI, it was the first time I had been privy to the mystery of my parents as people with dreams, hopes, fears and yes, passions, and not just as my mother and father. There are opportunities to learn more about our parents throughout our lives; if we’re lucky, they share things with us (although hopefully not naked photos!), if we’re smart and beyond the age when everything they do embarrasses us, we listen — or ask. But many of us don’t ask, and often by the time we might want to start poking around their past, they can no longer remember or they are no longer around.
My mother’s life was largely a secret to me, not because I wasn’t interested but because there were things she wouldn’t talk about, like the four years she spent coming-of-age in concentration camps not far from her native Romania. So I filled in the gaps with my vivid youthful imagination; I imagined dark, terrifying things that always made me want to protect her. My father didn’t have much use for talking about the past although he indulged me occasionally. When he told me that he’d wanted to be a pilot, I thought of him, dreaming about flying as he slept on a cot in the living room — the only bed he knew for 19 years before he was called to the army— of the one-bedroom Bronx apartment he grew up in with his sister and parents. Instead, he became a mechanical engineer, and often spent his weekends on the observation deck at JFK, watching planes take off and land.
Since I was shut out of much of their past, I only had the present. I wouldn’t say my parents had a perfect marriage, if such a thing exists. There was a lot of bickering, put-downs, a near-divorce and other nasty stuff, but I have enough nice memories to make me feel like I had a relatively happy, somewhat dysfunctional suburban childhood in a relatively happy, somewhat dysfunctional suburban family. I observed their marriage and took mental notes of what I’d want to keep and discard in my assumed future married life. It wasn’t until I got divorced at midlife, a mother of two, that I asked my mother if she was happy with marriage and motherhood; it was a mixed response. I didn’t think to ask my dad because it was easier to paint him as the “bad guy” — what complaints could he possibly have?
Almost two years ago, my father fell, hit his head, had brain surgery and became a permanent resident of a nursing home; at one point, when he was down to 86 pounds and refusing to eat, we feared we’d lose him. My mother visited him every day, neglecting her own ailing health as his improved. She passed away suddenly in December, two weeks after they’d marked 61 years of marriage. And so I began cleaning out their South Florida condo, sorting through 80-plus years of things that mattered to them. Deep in the spacious master suite closet, a new version of my parents began to emerge, pieces I couldn’t even imagine were part of the picture.
A box of letters from men addressed to my then-20-year-old mother describing their income, housing arrangements, hobbies and marriage suitability — the equivalent of today’s online dating profiles — surprised me at first. Had she placed an ad for a husband or were her aunt and uncle, with whom she stayed in the Bronx, hopeful to marry her off and take her off their hands? Since World War II robbed her of an education beyond middle school and Hitler robbed her of her home and her parents, what choice did she have but to marry and thus guarantee herself U.S. citizenship? That isn’t how she met my father, but they married after just six months — she was about a week shy of her 21st birthday, he was barely 25. Could it possibly have been true love?
And then I found a folder full of my father’s writings and in it were love poems to my mother, praising her flirty eyes, her full lips, her sweet kisses, her feminine figure — he was smitten! Other, later, writings questioned marriage, his ability as a lover and a husband, his helplessness when my mother was unhappy. I didn’t know this man; he certainly wasn’t the man I called Dad.
These were gifts, worth more than the old silverware and vintage Blaupunkt radio I found on the closet shelves, and I was filled with love and compassion for them.
I read one of my father’s love poems at my mother’s funeral; although he couldn’t be there, his words were. On a recent visit, I brought him a model airplane I found in their master suite closet; dementia and Parkinson’s are slowly taking their toll, but he remembered it and smiled. It’s so easy to please him now. As we sit in the garden at his nursing home, we look skyward together whenever a plane passes by.
I wonder what my children will learn about me when I die and they go through my closets and drawers. I hope they discover more about me as a girl and a woman, and not just their mother. I hope they find love and compassion for me, too. For now, however, I am sorting through all my photos very, very carefully!
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