Living with blinkers on

I’ve wanted to start a family blog for some months now but as usual life just gets in the way, so I thought I’d just take the bull by the horns and start. First let me just bring you up to date with what’s been happening.

Nothing is what I thought it was!

It seems that I have gone through life, and continue the journey with blinkers on. Up until the night, no, not night, I did not even know up not the moment my wife asked for a divorce that things in our life were so wrong.

And that’s not the only time!

I remember the shock of finding out that I was conceived before my parents got married, that in fact I was probably the reason for them committing to each other, an event that may or may not have naturally happened at all.

And no, I did not figure it out on my own. I was in my twenties when my younger sister made a passing comment about it. “Huh!” I answered, “What are you talking about?”

“Do the math” Giselle, my youngest sister, laughed realizing that I truthfully had not figure it out before now.

“Oh My God!” I blurted out, after a few quiet moments of feverish head calculations, “Why didn’t someone tell me?!”

And this,, after I counseled Rosemarie, my other sister, when she found out she was pregnant with her first child, not to get married to the father until after the birth. Reasoning that her hormones and emotions during a pregnancy would be too erratic to make a sensible decision. And here I am, a result of the same rash decision.

Not to say that Howard, her boyfriend of a few years and the baby’s father,  wasn’t her sole mate, which he turned out to be, but that they both needed time to sort out their feelings for each other, for themselves and ultimately for the baby, which at the time was complicated by the pregnancy.

And now, just a few days ago to discover, also from Giselle, that Dad and Mom had marital problems, to the point of them sleeping in separate beds…how did I not know this. Even our visit to Ireland when I was about nine, ostensibly to spend the summer with our grand parents, who I hadn’t seen since I left their home at five, might have been a split up of my parents. I always though it strange that my dad called only three weeks or so into the two month vacation and ask Mom to come home. I thought that he was so in love with Mom that he couldn’t handle a two month separation. Now maybe he was just willing to try being a family again.

Love, once committed, is eternal or so I thought. Oh I understand that life may change and that you may be forced to make decisions that you consider are in your best interest for your long term survival, and you might even have to leave the one you love, but that does not mean you stop loving them. Maybe I’m naïve, maybe I’m wrong and love isn’t eternal.

All I know that every time I given love, it has been unconditional and still remains alive today as it was when I first gave it, only tempered by time and experience. Every friend, every girlfriend, every teacher, every pet all still have ahold of my heart, whether they want to or not. They’ve all contributed to the person I am today and for that how can I not love each and everyone of them.

As I am beginning to discover, life, and my life in general, is more than I ever thought it was, I wonder what else has happened in my past that I am blissfully and totally unaware of? Help?!