What is an acceptable age gap between partners in a relationship? According to google one method of calculating this is as follows:
Minimum partner age: Half your age plus 7 or AGE/2+7
Maximum partner age: Your age minus 7 times 2 or (AGE-7)*2
Okay, I’m a numbers gal so I can get on board with this.
My parents met and started dating when my mother was 17, so according to the calculation above her new beau could be up to 20 no problem. Except my father was not 20, or anywhere to close to it. My father at that time was 46.
They were living in the Midwest when they met. Shortly after meeting they moved to WA state where they purchased the home that I would later refer to as “my father’s home”. It was a quarter acre lot with a small, very old house on it near Silver Lake in Everett. I believe they moved to WA state in large part to get away from my maternal grandparents who, as I understand it, were not big supporters of the union. For the first few years of their relationship, my parents lived publicly as father and daughter to avoid social scrutiny. “Hello neighbor, nice to meet you. This is my daughter, perhaps she and your girls will be friends…” I’m still not sure exactly how that works.
My father had 4 children from his first marriage: two girls and two boys. The second-youngest, my half-sister, happened to be exactly one day older than my mother. Isn’t that sweet? Most of the siblings didn’t have much, if any, contact with my parents, especially in the early years. The sister who was a day older than my mom was the exception; she maintained a relationship with my parents and later with me. She would have two children who were 3 and 6 years younger than I, we would visit them once or twice a year. I liked visiting my sister and my niece and nephew as a child.
My parents had me when my mother was 27 and my father was 56. My childhood memories of my father are all of him in his 60s and 70s. My parents divorced when I was around 3 and my mother and I moved into a small duplex. We would spend the remainder of my childhood rotating between living at my father’s house and moving out on our own. Neither of my parents was particularly good at functioning fully by themself.
My mother was my primary parent, but I had a relationship with my dad. He was a goofy guy and I enjoyed hanging out with him. He would visit me and bring horror movies to watch when I was smaller. When I got older, we would go on Sunday drives and have little adventures. He was playful and childlike, which made for some fun activities such as running up the down elevator and down the up elevator until we got kicked out of department stores. My father adored both my mother and me. I was his little princess and had him wrapped around my finger. He did just about anything I asked, even when he probably shouldn’t have. Neither of my parents was very keen on making or following rules. I was the one who made a lot of the rules growing up.
I remember once when I was about 7 and my mother and I were living in a tiny one-bedroom duplex in Shoreline, my dad came over to visit. He and I went on a walk to my school, where we discovered a baby bird lying on the cement walkway under a pillar that housed its nest. I thought it was a rubber toy at first because of its bulging purple eyes and lack of feathers. I didn’t realize that it was alive until I had already run over and touched it. My father told me that since I had touched it, the mother would reject it, and for the same reason we could not just put it back into the nest. So, we took it home. We turned the oven on very low and left the oven door open, wrapped the baby bird up in a towel, and stuck it in. We found and mashed up worms and tried to stick the paste into the little guy’s mouth. The bird didn’t last the night, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.
About that same age, I would beg him to do his magic trick when he would visit. He would take an apple or orange and then he would turn off the light, when he turned it back on he had made the item disappear! He could then switch the light off and on again and the item would be back. I loved that magic trick.
When I was a bit older, we had a tradition of following those searchlights that stores would shine up into the night sky to attract customers. We would be driving, and I would see one off in the distance and point. “There! I see one! Follow that light!” And off we would go, often times never finding the source. We would just drive around with me calling out where to turn and him following my directions and laughing. He would smoke cigarettes in the car and when I would yell at him to stop smoking, he would smile and say, “I’m not smoking, the cigarette is.”
When my father and I would go out together, people would inevitably refer to him as my grandpa and it was usually easier not to correct them. I spent my childhood hanging out with and often living under the same roof as my daddy-grandpa, who I referred to as Wendell. Per request, I addressed both of my parents by their first names. Eventually, in my preteen years, I started calling my mother “mom” due to social pressure. Whenever I would call across a room to my mother using her name my friends would give me weird looks and ask me why I called her Caryla instead of mom. It was just another place for me to feel disconnected and different from my peers. Caryla didn’t like it when I started calling her mom, but I continued to do it anyway. But, since I was not frequently around both my peer group and my father at the same time, I never stopped calling him Wendell.
Patchwork Girl 