When I was five I didn’t know my mother was in an open marriage, and for the most part neither did she.  My parents married when my mother was 24, just out of college, and my father, 29, played basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters. He did the road thing. She did the home and hearth thing.  I did the burp and gurgle thing.  The union, from what little my mother will allow herself to be harassed about, was clearly not ideal.  Marriage based on the understood notion (my father's) that what happens on the road, stays on the road, can hardly be expected to thrive when the one not on the road is left to tend an endless pile of dirty diapers (cloth diapers mind you), and, then too, confronted with the ticker tape parade of women's phone numbers wafting from one’s husband’s trousers those nights he does come home.  

This is how it was in the 60s.  Some might say this is also how it is today with professional ball players, politicians, anyone really (men) in high paying, power positions.  As my father’s “little woman.” my mother commanded the envy of other young women like herself: small town girls who were brought up to think that the key to the “good life” was first and foremost getting a degree, and second, and just as important, making sure that in the process of obtaining that degree, you also become some bright young man’s Mrs.

In large part, for my mother’s time, this was a sound and well proven strategy for success. While in college she met my father and they married soon after. We lived in a nice home in a tony Connecticut suburb. She had a car, fashionable clothes, and an undeniably cute toddler. And for these perks, as my father’s wife, she only had to be a little accomodating and turn a blind eye to all the Professional Basketball Wife wannabes lurking about.

Unfortunately for my father (Newt and Ashton too it seems), he married the least accommodating woman he possibly could have. Two years in and we were gone, having settled in Washington, D.C. Two, free and single girls as my mother got a job as a secretary, and I became a latch key preschooler with a nose for sniffing out felons in training, all seemingly content to try out babysitting as they figured out their next big caper.

It was a good life. My mother was a future Mary Richards, and I was her very young Rhodaesque friend. And it could have stayed this way indefinitely if my father hadn’t showed up at our door three years later with his new wife and my new half baby brother in tow. 

What did he want?  Did he want to apologize for being silly enough to think that anyone with any measure of self esteem would allow herself to share her man with another woman, or even still, other women?  Did he come to visit me, to see how I was thriving, whether I was reaching all those milestones crucial to a child’s early development?  No. Not hardly. Done with basketball, he now needed a job to provide for his Phase II family--seems like Newt, my father was staunchly pro-family. And being so, he wanted my mother, who now knew everyone in local D.C. government, to make some calls on his behalf.

My mother made these calls not because she’s particularly kindhearted--because, frankly, she ain’t--but because she could. I’m sure she wanted to send a clear message to my father, one both he and the little girl (my father’s new bride was seventeen, a “kissing cousin” from his home town in Kentucky) would always remember. She wanted them to understand that she was the prize in their brief union, both of us. And we should have been all he needed. Our family. Hindsight being greatly improved, perhaps he did understand, only sadly too late for Family Phase I to benefit. 

My father was really tall. I remember thinking this as he looked around our home, commenting on this or that, how nice our two bedroom apartment was, letting us know how close it was over at his sister’s place, where he and his brood slept in the living room, on the pullout sofa. I’m sure my mother took satisfaction in hearing this, being able say if not out loud, then quietly to herself. “Not such hot stuff anymore.”

I think this is what Marianne Gingrich wanted to do, tell everyone, “Newt, you’re not such hot stuff anymore,” or more to the point, nor should you ever be allowed to be again. Perhaps a better way for a former spouse to get closure would be to not tell all his (and your) business, but to show him and everyone else how brilliantly you've moved on. This was my mother’s way. I think it worked, seeing how I never heard her say another word good or bad about my father after this first, and what would end up being his last visit to Family Phase I.

©2012Willett Thomas