Fourty-Five Minutes

         When I was a young girl growing up in Southern California I did a lot of traveling. Being the love child of two wandering souls; my spirit was bound to carry on in this legacy of a life in between. After years of my own conscious movement, I often forget this voyaging identity was carved early into my bones, setting deep within my spine the narrative of my future explorations to come.

          My parents came to be in two very separate ways. To this day I still can’t say I know the extent of my father’s journeys as only later in life have I become privy to chapters of his adventures. Born in the heart of Texas his father took his last breaths within a few short months after his son’s very first, thereby marking the beginning of his trek in the spacious unknown. Running away from his own fatherless home at fifteen to return to the familiar shores of Floridian beaches, his choices since have reflected an early solemn commitment to live a liminal existence.

          My mother’s journey into her wandering soul, however familiar a tune, has more ambiguous roots. The second of eight children, she was spoiled from a young age by the puritanical epitome of a perfect union. She was smart, beautiful, and vivacious with a strong heart and a stubborn head. However after being launched from the comforting nest of their love, her independent soul would lead her into a lifelong quest in search of the male equivalent of her canonized father, an outside sense of fulfillment that was reinforced through religious gendered narratives. Despite independent roots, this idea of eternal co-dependence somewhat stunted the breadth of her self-exploration in a way that I’m not sure has ever been self-actualized.

In the end, both ironically solidified their independent identities with the defying act of marriage. They believed that, like many couples, their own incapacity to transcend into that final state of stability could be treated in the arms of another person. It just wasn't until my sister and I were born that they could truly admit this deception and once more continue on their separate journeys.

My parents split when I was two, and like most children from broken homes I spent much of my formative years traveling between two very different providers. A lot of people try to pity me into believing I had less of a childhood with divorced parents, but the fact is I never knew anything different. While I realized there was a different dynamic in the homes of friends and family with parents who fell asleep longingly in each other’s arms, I never went a day in my life without love. My love for my parents was not predicated on their love for each other in return, and thinking about my parents being together was even stranger to me than their separation. My parents were two very different types of people—my father a shadowed mysterious moon to my mother’s bold and vivacious sun. The completeness of their one holistic unity completely evaded me, an ignorance that helped shelter my adolescent innocence.

I don’t remember much of my first years living in Los Angeles, and what memories I believed I had have been long sense been shrouded in doubt through the depths of time. By the time my mother decided she needed to get out of the stuffy confines of her childhood home, I had already lived in enough houses to match my age. When I was 4 my mother moved us to a small town in Oceanside, leaving our relationship to our father to be largely confined to weekends, birthdays, or otherwise special occasions rather. For my father, who spent the first several years as a supportive feminist husband tending to our raising, this was a hard blow. While my father loved us, distance of any kind always transforms a relationship—this move being the first real test of his commitment. After the move, the amount of time I actually saw my father usually had strong correlations with which female benefactor he was seeing at the time.

For most of my childhood his long-time girlfriend Ingrid was intertwined with every part of our rearing, showering us with attention and gifts as if we were her own children. She was a straightforward no-nonsense type, deeply generous and deeply independent. I think it would do her discredit to say that her own sense of self did not deeply influence my upbringing being surrounded by such a strong personality. My most vivid memories of my father and Ingrid always center around food [no doubt a product of my budding childhood obesity] and often when I would return to Los Angeles we’d all congregate at Islands restaurant. Huddled around a small booth waiting for the hamburgers that could never quite meet Ingrid’s medium-rare expectations, Ingrid would openly chide us for kicking her underneath the table in our childish restlessness.

However despite our young imperfections, the two continued to attend almost every soccer game, oftentimes spoiling us by renting a decked out snazzy sports car to drive home in. My sister and I would battle for a seat next to our father, all the while resisting the urge to stand up in our seats and feel the wind in our hair—secure in the fact that we were alive and loved. While our relationship to Ingrid could never quite rival the love of our mother, she will always be dear to my heart as another prominent maternal figure in my life. By taking him under her wing she allowed us the ultimate gift of a father’s love that might have otherwise been absent with his lack of material resources and initiative.

            However despite my naivety I was aware enough to realize that being the product of divorce was not all sugar coated lanes and fairy tale happy endings. Living this life mid-way between two sources of love I often felt strained. Meeting up in Irvine, halfway between my mother in San Diego and father in Los Angeles, came to symbolize for me the very thesis of this hardship. Many times I would sit balling to my mother from the back seat, begging her to turn around so I wouldn’t have to endure my father’s sometimes sporadic and vindictive fits of rage. He was like that sometimes, short tempered and violent—something I would later attribute to his hot Irish blood and strong-headed masculine will to domination. These outbursts occurred so infrequently however that each encounter seemed like a flash of lightning, sudden and unexpected though painfully lethal. It always stemmed from the mundane—a lost card game, an indulgent dismissal of parental request, a refusal to eat our mandated vegetables. Though I have far less recollections of these childhood “punishments” than my sister, they are nonetheless crisp in my fatherly constructions. Despite recent attempts at reestablishing a positive relationship with my father, my cheek still silently throbs from that one defining blow years ago.

Likewise there would be times I would sit in silence in the front seat near to my father, holding back tears at the thought of returning back to the long days of school and day-care, waiting for my struggling mother to drag herself away from the providing role she had had to assume. These car rides to Irvine with my father are perhaps the most memorable ones I have—The Monkees blasting their familiar tunes from the car’s stereo, the promise of eternity lying just at the end of horizon. My father loved driving, feeling the steady rhythm of the engine purring beneath our feet, the consistency of movement blowing kisses on our sun streaked faces. In between “Last Train to Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer” my dad would let out his immortal phrase in a voice he reserved solely for the rueful silliness of a child’s spirit. “Forty-five minutes from Hawthorne California to Irvine Center Drive!” he would bellow, his blue eyes glinting in the California sunshine. That’s how I’ll always remember him. Head flung back, a grin of boyish candor lighting up his age weathered face.

While I never imagined my parents together, I also knew that they could never be fully apart. There are forces which attempt to tie us together, even in the bonds of our common anguish and hatred. Their union had merely transformed, not diminished, affecting each of them in different ways.

Whatever streak of sunlight I might have witnessed in my father’s wanderings has since dulled to the fading glow of a cloudy moon. Realizing that love is not enough to fill you up, my father has since indulged in a haphazard journey. Seeing the love my father holds to this day for my mother, the paradoxical defeatist acceptance and yet defiant longing in the recesses of his shattered soul leaves me questioning my own adventurous motives. I fear this is the same emotion I smother within myself—this inability sometimes to understand the twofold mission of both running two and away from things simultaneously. I fear that his complete vulnerability that leaves one scarred for life in the name of love’s inescapable tragedy will be my own fate. The reality that some journeys, even from those we love, are meant to take us apart.

It wasn't until the maturity of adulthood that I began to let myself wonder what might have been. How that forty-five minutes of space might have been lessened if their wandering spirits had at last found loving communion through their daughter’s outstretched arms. How this mysterious moon I often referenced back to in my silent nights could come to rule a space so bleak and fearful. How my own slice of moon might hide itself from preying eyes, fearing its exploitation and further abandonment. And still I walk the road of my traveling heart, searching like young Oedipus to both escape from and return to the arms of a familiar nurturer, echoing my mother’s own heartbreaking journey. To seek solace in the arms of a beloved, whatever form that might come to me in.