My mother called off her engagement
in 1967,
I think.
I have no idea why
but I can guess.
She didn't love him
more than herself
did not want a life with him
more than a life of her own.
Maybe she could tell
that a marriage
to my father
would be years of disrespect,
and that wasn't the kind of mutuality she was looking for.
Again, conjecture.
I never even knew that she did it
until my father announced
he had asked for a divorce
and my sister and I breathed
for the first time in our lives.
That's when I was speaking to him.
Before he asked his forner brother-in-law
to help get the union annulled
in the church
so he could marry again
make his children bastards.
Not that any of us
kept in the tradition
of Catholicism.
Not that he ever married again.
Not that he ever saw the annullment through.
Before I came out
and he panicked
that his youngest
was buying a white dress
well, ivory.
Before I called him out
and called for help
and then stopped calling.
But this isn't about me
or him.
It's about my mother
and her mother.
"This is why we send you to college."
And then it was 1968
