God Bless This Mess(12)
They started spending more and more time together, and they fell in love. At first my mom wasn’t sure she wanted to be with a guy who was so much older than she was, and who already had a daughter. But her dad, my grandfather, told her, “You don’t get to pick who you fall in love with.” So my mom just followed her heart and jumped into the marriage.
My mom used to repeat that phrase to me all the time, so it’s ironic that I ended up going on a reality TV show with the express goal of picking who I’d fall in love with. But the way she explained that phrase was more of a warning for my heart. Like, “Be careful who you let your heart open to, because you don’t get to pick who you fall in love with sometimes. And you have to be ready for whatever comes with that, once you’ve made the decision to put your heart out there.”
I’ve definitely learned that the hard way these last couple of years.
I guess to some people there’s something really unique and kinda cool and romantic about my parents’ story, the way they didn’t let a big difference of age or a child from a prior relationship stand in the way of their love for each other. But I said this on TV, and I know they heard it because I was sitting on the couch right next to them watching my season of The Bachelorette when I said it, so I think it’s safe to say it here again: I don’t want the kind of marriage my parents have. I appreciate that they love each other, and they’ve stuck it out and done everything they could to make it work, and I know they always worked as hard as they did to support my brother and me. But I could see—even from a very young age—that their relationship could be toxic at times.
The ugly truth is that their marriage consisted of a lot of built-up resentment, a lot of fighting, a lot of harsh words and threats of leaving that they yelled at each other in the middle of the night, using language that I would never, ever want to hear in my own marriage. It’s bad enough that I had to hear it as a little girl, hiding in my bedroom.
In so many ways, after trying to rebel against her strict upbringing, my mom wound up playing the role of the good southern wife. And I’m so thankful for that! I knew I could count on my mom to be there, no matter what, and that was such a gift. This came after putting herself through college, and doing her best to be a strong, independent woman. She loved being a stay-at-home mom for us at first, to be the mom she never really had, to be present for us at school, as a volunteer, alongside the full-time unpaid position of taking care of the entire household. But I don’t think there’s any such thing as a stay-at-home mom. She was always on the go and doing more than that. The older we got, the more it seemed like she was always working for my dad directly, too, as a sort of partner in the business: doing the books and helping to manage the day-to-day tasks, but with no credit and nothing in particular to show for herself. She didn’t earn a paycheck. She didn’t have her own money, which meant she didn’t have her own freedom. And she knew it.
My mom raised me to be smart and do well in school so I could be “independent,” she said. So I wouldn’t have to “depend on a man.” And I heard those words when she said ’em. They stuck with me, obviously, or I wouldn’t be repeating them here in this book. But what I saw at home was her working her tail off just trying to keep up the household and being entirely dependent on my dad, even when he yelled at her. She had no choice but to stay in that marriage, because where was she supposed to go? She didn’t have a résumé to speak of. She didn’t have a degree—not just because she married young, but because she quit school to care for her own mother when her mom tried to commit suicide. (I’ll share more details about this in a later chapter.) So truly, she was stuck. And that dysfunction showed up in our home in all sorts of different ways.
We rarely ate meals together at the kitchen table. The table was covered in a pile of laundry and usually some paperwork, since it served as my mom’s makeshift office. If we ate together at all, it was at the coffee table in front of the TV, or on whatever surface wasn’t piled up with all kinds of other stuff. Our house wasn’t dirty. It was just chaotic. It was never, ever anything close to the showplaces that so many of my friends’ houses seemed to be.
We said grace over our food sometimes, but it wasn’t a consistent thing at all. We didn’t go to church with any consistency, either. We went more than just Easter and Christmas, but there was no rhyme or reason to it. If me or my brother woke up late on Sunday morning and said we didn’t want to go, my parents pretty much shrugged their shoulders and said, “Okay.”
Noooo! I thought. I desperately wanted them to make us go to church, and to make us say grace before every meal, and to ask me questions about scripture the way I saw and heard my friends’ parents do.
I just couldn’t understand why we lived so different than they all did. I wanted more structure. I wanted more God. I craved for everything to be a little less chaotic.
I mentioned already that my dad was a hairstylist, and that fact all by itself made us “different.” All the other kids’ dads were doctors, or lawyers, or construction workers. Some of them were professors at the University of Alabama. But nobody else’s dad was a hairstylist. I got made fun of relentlessly for that. Kids would bully me and say my dad must be gay just because of his job. (Welcome to Alabama in the mid-2000s!) My seventh-grade teacher made fun of my dad and his profession one day, in front of the whole class. And it all got so confusing. There were times when I questioned whether my dad might actually be gay, just because he did something creative. That was before I really knew what gay meant. I thought it was just some sort of a bad word, because that’s how kids used it. Once I knew better, I knew for sure my dad wasn’t gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but then I kept wondering, Why would that be a bad thing anyway? And why did I deserve to be picked on and made fun of because of it?