Whats Love Got to Do with It?

Living SS (suddenly single), I grew to dread the ten-mile drive home.  I would pick Lilly up from daycare and later from preschool, with a snack in hand.  Her blood sugar drops were horrendous and deafening in the afternoons, a fight I was unwilling to face.  That was an easy fix.  If only the other issue was as easy. It was the questions. 

Lilly had me trapped.  I wanted to quietly unwind and decompress after dealing with people all day; those ten miles of driving should have been my time.  Instead, I was enclosed in a moving interrogation room with a three-foot-tall district attorney. When the questions began, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t fantasize about opening the door and throwing myself out of the vehicle.  One day, a particularly ugly question reared its head.

“Did you ever love my Daddy?”

Now, where did that come from? I knew that the kids in Head Start and daycare huddled together and discussed the adults.  Like some sort of bug under a microscope, they studied us, watched every move, every word.  Our rituals, our plumage, our very existence were studied by those miniature anthropologists. 

Lilly’s findings were later relayed to me in casual conversation; she always felt compelled to disclose her scientific findings.  It was from Lilly that I learned about the drama of daycare life. Playing house at daycare, Ayden had grown tired of staying home with the baby dolls while Lilly went to work.  Apparently, he needed to step up in his role as a father, and Lilly educated him on that, leaving him with a distinctive ring of teeth marks on his forearm.

I learned that grandparents are foster parents. That you are supposed to call people your friends, even if you don’t like them very much.  I knew Patrick thought physical therapy was boring.  I was scornfully informed that Riley was better at sign language than I was; he used it faster.  So somewhere, someone had talked about love today.  I could see how that conversation got started. 

“Where do babies come from?”

"My mom said you have to love somebody to have a baby.”

“Ewww, I don’t think that is right. I don’t think my mom ever loved my daddy.”

So now, I am the tie breaker.  What I said in reply to her question would be given to the other daycare children.  Like I had done before with my cousins, Lilly would give a personal TED talk on all things about mommies and daddies, love, and babies. I had to step up for Lilly; heaven knows my parents were no help to me.

My parents had never given me a straight answer to my questions of: “Did you fall in love with Mom/Dad?” 

I interviewed them both repeatedly in my early childhood.  Together, then separately, to make sure they weren’t pressured to provide the answer.  I wanted to make sure that Mom and Dad had their stories straight.

I had my preconceived notions about the whole thing, of course.  Mom and Dad were old.  Everyone knows love wasn’t invented until sometime after I was born.  Until 1963 or some years afterward, love didn’t really exist.  Parents got married because they wanted kids, needed someone to help on the farm, or it was required after a certain age. But love, like in the movies and TV shows, wasn’t a thing for old people.

Old people kissing, giggling, and holding hands was too gross to imagine. There was no way my parents did that.  Long before I had even a concept of sex, romance between parents gave me the yuck factor. 

My parents didn’t help me to believe in love and romance.  When questioned, they gave very unsatisfactory answers.

“Oh, when I met your father, all I could think of was, ‘that man is the ugliest man I ever seen with that huge nose.  He doesn’t have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of.’ I had to marry your father to rescue him.  He wouldn’t have had anything if I hadn’t felt sorry for him.”

“I had to marry your ma to get her away from Harry Dornbush.  He was all over her, and she was too dumb to get away.  Someone had to rescue her, or she wouldn’t have had anything. I felt sorry for her.”

Then there was the often-repeated story of my grandmother.  She was traded to the local drunk bachelor as a teenager.  A team of gray horses and Grandpa Charlie had bought himself a teen bride who was decades his junior.   This was an accepted fact that love and marriage are transactional.

My aunties and uncles were no help either.  It seems that Aunt Hazel married Erick because he was so skinny that someone had to cook for him.  He married her because Grandma had too many girls on her hands; he had to help her out and take one of them. Aunt June married Uncle Eino because he was going into the army and needed someone to write to him. 

Like cousin Sonny, Eddie Schmidt had never married, so of course, had no children.  I knew how that worked, Mom said you must have a husband to have children, that’s where babies come from.  Since they had no wife to be a husband with, they couldn’t have babies of their own. 

Obviously, Cousin Sonny and Eddie were able to take care of themselves, so no one felt sorry enough to marry them.

As he would later do to me, Dad would tease Donna and Tubby about getting married off in trade for sheep or hay.  As the annoying youngest child, I often joined in, not quite realizing the joke but also knowing it was a grown-up thing to do.

Recruited to clean the house to spit-shine and polish because Donna’s latest boyfriend was coming over to meet her parents, I found the whole task ridiculous.

“If you would just date one of the Diesel boys, we wouldn’t have to do all this work,” I whined to my teenage sister.

I didn’t understand her disgusted response, accompanied by fake gagging.  It made perfect sense to me.  The Diesel boys were always hanging around, talking machinery with Dad, with goofy grins and making cow eyes at Donna. They were available boyfriend material if she wanted a boyfriend. Dad called them the Diesel boys. I have no idea what earned them that moniker, but it was the only name I knew for the two young men.

The Diesel boys hadn’t bathed since the last rainstorm.  The layers of dirt encrusted on their skin and clothing were admirable. As Mom would say, they could have grown potatoes in that dirt.  It was hard to tell where the clothing began and the dirt left off.

“They just come over to see Donna, but they are too shy to talk to her.” Mom explained.

Why anyone would want to see Donna was beyond me.  All she cared about was horses, make-up, and looking pretty all the time. She never shared with me, and she was bossy. I knew Mom was not telling me the truth; all the Diesel boys did was talk to Dad about tractors and stand around looking silly.

If Donna made one or both Diesel boys her boyfriend, I wouldn’t have to help clean house. They wouldn’t care if my toys were picked up or not.  They wouldn’t even notice if there was dust on the knick-knacks on the shelves.  There certainly wouldn’t be any point in waxing the linoleum floor for them.  If Donna insisted on having a boyfriend, despite the yuck factor in that idea, she could just pick out one of those two.

Mom and Dad laughed uproariously at the idea of Donna dating the Diesel boys. If she was going to feel sorry for some boy and rescue them, then why not one of the two?  The Diesel boys might have been brothers, or even twins; in my eyes, they were interchangeable.

They probably wouldn’t mind if she lived at home with us after they got married.  Nothing needed to change, and nothing would have to be dusted.

After my pronouncement, Donna was teased a lot about the Diesel boys. Each time, Dad’s comments were met with an “eww,” “yuck,” or fake gagging. I didn’t find the humor in Dad’s teasing.  I had offered an easy solution to a problem that would have saved us time and effort.

Dad teased Tubby about getting married, too.  But the fun just wasn’t in it with him.  Tubby didn’t have dramatic gagging or denials.  Tubby’s response was always the same:

“I am going to be a bachelor like August (Uncle Eino’s brother) and teach my kids to be the same.”

Dad would chuckle, but I could see that the answer didn’t sit well with Mom.  For some reason, she didn’t want Tubby to be a bachelor, or maybe she didn’t want him to teach his kids not to marry. 

I didn’t understand why she didn't want Tubby to live like August.  August lived in a shack out in the woods and was a trapper.  He came and went wherever and whenever he wanted. August was self-sufficient; he didn’t need rescuing. I felt sort of sorry for Tubby; even Mom didn’t think he could make it on his own like August.

Perhaps it was the issue of teaching his kids to be bachelors.  But that made no sense at all. Why wouldn’t Tubby want his kids to be independent and self-sufficient?  It would take a couple more years before I put it all together.

I had asked the same question Lilly was asking me now.  This time, I was an adult and had to come up with the answers on my own.  I had made a promise to never lie to Lilly.  I remember my own childhood and the frustration of unanswered questions. Bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was life were gathered over time and observation.  I knew that to Lilly, this was a serious and real question.  The answer would affect how she put together the jigsaw puzzle of her life. 

Yet I kept coming back to the promise I had made to myself, that I would never lie to my daughter.  That I would answer her questions with the seriousness with which they were asked.  That I would tell her the truth, to the level that she could understand.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, I met Lilly’s eyes as she waited for an answer. She was my world, and I was hers.  I was a subject matter expert, no matter the subject.  My answer carried enormous weight for a preschooler.

I had no choice but to answer truthfully. Time would teach her the nuances of emotions. She would learn so much more as she grew older.  But for now, at her age, the world was black and white, with no room for gray.  I thought carefully and said truthfully:

“Of course I love your daddy, he gave me you, the best present I could ever have, and because of that I will always love him.”