Big A and The Suze

What were your parents doing at your age?

I left for Colorado at 18 years old, with a back pack, a couple hundred bucks and attitude to spare. Flipping the middle finger as I walked out the door. After a few years in Vail, suffering through a perfect storm of self-inflicted emotional turmoil and humiliation; I decided it was time to reclaim myself and create a new life.  I knew it wouldn’t happen if I stayed in that ski-bum town. As much as I hated it, that meant a pit stop with my parents in Wisconsin, while I figured out my plan. 

Big A and The Suze (what I call my parents) were 46 and 42, but still liked to party like they were in their 20s. They would take me out drinking. We’d sing karaoke and play slot machines. They gave me extra money to go meet my friends at the next bar. They’d say nothing when they found random guys on our couch or my bed in the morning. For the first time in my life, I felt like they were my friends instead of enemies. But I had enough friends, what I needed was parents.

One morning I woke up naked, in the bed of one of their drinking buddies, with no recollection of how I got there.  It’s not that it was out of the ordinary for me to wake up in such a state, but through the fog of my hangover, something felt different.  As Jim drove me home in silence, I sat with my heart in my throat, and a knowing in the pit of my belly. I was pregnant. I just knew it. In my attempt to become a better version of myself, I had inadvertently run straight into a misadventure of epic proportion. It turns out Colorado was not the problem.   

I had expected anger, disapproval, disgust even. I spent most of my innocent childhood in a constant state of shame and fear, seemingly for merely existing. Now, I had actually fucked up. I landed myself in a truly serious predicament. A quandary I couldn’t talk myself out of, or drink away. Literally, I could not drink. But inexplicably, instead of berating me, branding me a slut, or even throwing me out, they treated me with a gentleness I hadn’t even experienced as a small child.

In her early 40’s The Suze was only too thrilled to find her eldest daughter pregnant and in trouble. I myself, was an unplanned pregnancy when she was also 21 years old. We finally had something in common. Big A insisted that I should not work in my condition. They set up an apartment for me in their basement.  They bought all of my favorite foods and doted on me with an affection completely foreign to me. They were over the moon to be grand parents. I think they thought it would be a second chance. When my baby came, they were helpful and as supportive as their lifestyle allowed. 

My parents are wildly imperfect. They were pretty terrible to me growing up. Even in their late sixties they are emotionally immature and continue to live in a state of chaos and dysfunction I find intolerable.

But for that brief moment in time, the only time I can remember, they were there when I needed them. I’ll give them credit for that Little Victory.