The Coming out of Left Field Story for Today:

So for today I got some disturbing news, one of my relatives was getting divorced. Why significant? Because ever since I had been living on my own, meeking out an existence, I used to spend my holidays by myself on campus a lot. I told my relative, she couldn’t believe it that I had been doing it for that long, and insisted I come to stay with them for the holidays. This was around 2006 I think, give or take. But anyways, it took me a while to adjust their abode because they were like a family, you know, with the kids and 2 parents with careers that were actually together. See when I was growing up, on my mom’s side of the family (which raised me more or less), most of my aunts and uncles had already divorced at least once, with usually my cousins paying the prices for their sometimes irresponsible decisions (that they still pay for till this day). So when I would spend time my relatives that was married, it was like wow, you don’t’ see that happening everyday. And little by little, as I spent my holiday breaks and summer breaks and interludes between school at their house, I felt myself become attached, as if they were in a way, the parents I never had. Even though there were certain things I couldn’t’ feel myself belonging to in their family, overall I was relatively happy. Now of course I was not naïve and I knew they had their fair share of arguments and disagreements and what have you, but you know I figure hey that’s all apart of being married. Then there was this news today. When I was told this morning, I felt a bit of wind sail from me because last time my relative called last semester near my finals, he was telling me news that one of my cousins had been killed. So needless to say, I did not see this coming. I felt a bit sad (thanks to the wonderfully dreary weather of dark clouds and coldness that had been prevalent around here all day today) about it, as if they were my parents getting divorced and this was affecting me personally. I just wonder how their kids are going to handle it. Well they were reassuring me that I could still come home and stay but I don’t know, it just didn’t feel the same right off the bat, and I wasn’t going to go “home” till middle of May after my finals to get a touch up of good ole Houston.
But it made me realize, I think they were the last of maternal relatives that I knew of that had been a relatively stable marriage that was over 40. Well so much for that. And its amazing that out of my childhood friends I had, I never knew who my father was and he was deceased, a sister and brother father was deceased, one of the half-brothers father really didn’t come around to see his son and the other brother father was in the prison. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was considered the norm in the neighborhood, and the fact that we were being raised still relatively and recently good was a rarity.
Lately I had been questioning whether I would ever get married, given my current track rate of how my “dating” life and “relationship” life had been going. I sort of always had a bit of an apprehension of marriage, but it certainly did not mean I advocate shacking up with an implied common-law marriage. But regardless, its just one of those things to chalk up that marriage might be overrated, overstated or even understated in today’s world. At least I am friends with one young married couple I went to middle school with that’s starting out and they seem to be going really well. For the older crowd per se, I guess I have to lean on my close homegirls and homeboy whose folks I have met, almost met, and personally know to lean on to understand and witness what a good marriage still means in today’s world.