And when people say they've been married 30 years and they're about the same age as my parents, I have to do a double-take before I realize that my situation is less than normal. My parents were to have been married 30 years this September (coincidentally, the same day the parents of an ex of mine are to celebrate their 30th anniversary), had they not split up in 1981.
Or was it final in 1982? I don't know; I was too little to remember. Two- and three-year-olds never know what's going on.
People ask me sometimes how long my parents have been married, and I answer with sixteen years, how long my father and stepmother have been married. So to me it's normal to have a 55-year-old father who's celebrating just sixteen years of marriage. My parents will be lucky to hit 30 years -- they'd be almost 70 by then, and the way my dad doesn't take care of my health, I'm not sure he'll make it till then.
And now my mother's engaged to my stepdad, with no date set for marriage. The odd thing is when she does get married to Kevin, it'll be weird because for most of my life she hasn't been married. She's been married before, but it was for such a short period of time that I hardly remember it.
The whole thing is just kind of scary. I wonder what's going to happen in my future. I'm as good as engaged to Kurt, with the idea that we'd get married next year at the earliest -- but it worries me that I haven't had very good models of marriage in my experience. Yes, my stepmom and father have refrained from killing each other, but I'm not quite sure how. And being raised by a stepparent isn't the same as being raised by both of your biological parents in the same home.
Do you realize I don't remember my parents sharing a home? My whole life I've lived here and my mother's lived there.
Which all in all shows that I'm going to have issues when I get married to Kurt. My father and my stepmother's way of resolving issues is to scream at one another and threaten each other with divorce. That's not going to work with Kurt and me -- we've already tried it.
I just hope that we emulate Kurt's parents instead of my father and stepmother, and in the 2030s we can be celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary also...