Contemplating that gaping divide, I always had it as mere coincidence that my grandparents on both sides were particularly conservative and against the union of my parents. It has taken a lot of thought and reflection for me to recognize just how radically different things were for parents of that era whose children were of the counterculture. The psychological limitations of my grandparents—that inability for them to grasp or relate to what was happening with hippies and the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War activism—accentuated by a desperate need to hold on to the last vestiges of 1950s wholesomeness must’ve been excruciating. In less than two decades, my grandparents would have heard the swoony melodies of their day turn into loud rock-n-roll and protest songs.

Suddenly, music took on all kinds of meaning that would expose any shallow, smarminess of previous generations, and all those nice-looking kids with crewcuts would soon become long-haired, bearded hippies who smoked weed.

Talk about beyond their command—an old world rapidly aging. I’m sure it was all a bit much. 

When I try to relate to their parental freak-out, I reckon it’s something akin to when I’m having a batshitcrazymom day, like when my son locked himself in his room the night he was supposed to go for his Boy Scout rank interview and I had a deadline and it was the holidays and I’d had about enough of this bullshit and my husband’s, too, for that matter, so fuck this and I kicked the door in. Oh yeah, totally, I muse, in retrospect, I can pretty much see why any mom of any generation did any crazy-ass thing, like storming into the Williamsburg apartment to break up that hippie love fest and pot-smoking den of sin. Or in the case of my maternal grandmother, changing the wedding date in the date book so everyone would think the grandchild (me) had been born after marriage, not out of wedlock—as if anybody ever went back through the date book and gave half a shit.

In addition to their respective conservative upbringings, I have also pointed out to my mother that she and my father were both the first-born children of three siblings and came from families where they were never accepted for who they were. There must’ve been something about that, and the perfect storm that was the 1960s, but it’s nothing that she or my father recognized during their time together.

When my mother went off to Europe for a few weeks at the end of the summer of ‘66, she realized just how much she had fallen for my father. On her return in September, she landed a job as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school, and she and my father got their own place together. By spring of 1967, there was some talk about getting married, although my mother says they weren’t sure how to go about it. In Virginia, you had to get a blood test, and there was some kind of waiting period she thinks had something to do with disease. So instead, they hopped in Daddy’s car and went off to North Carolina to get married, but when they got there, everything was closed.

“Besides we were both drunk and had driven all night, so that fell through,” she says.

Sitting across the table from my mother at a cafe in Wayne, Pennsylvania, I’m hearing this chronological telling of my parents’ early life together for the first time. I’m on my second latte, hanging on her every word. I had heard bits and pieces, highlights, my father’s version of something or my mother’s telling of the same. But now that I’m getting this collective history, I realize for the first time just how much I long to give voice to what they had as a couple before I came along, and before the other marriage and kids. It’s as though everything that happened between my parents was discounted because we were the divorced ones, my mother and me. My experience and understanding of their life together was suppressed for the sake of his other family, not because anybody made me do that, but it just seemed like that’s what had to be done. Only between themselves and with me could they exchange stories, laughs and memories.

To even put the words down, I have to summon courage from places I’ve never had to before to let my own experience and knowledge of my parents and their lives and my birth be freely expressed without hesitation or concern for how it might affect anybody else. Maybe it matters far less to others and is merely the residual concern of a child who learned to be careful about such things from an early age—fearful of offending, of creating jealousy or strife, of rocking the boat more than it was already being rocked.

After their botched elopement, my mother says she and my father started to drift apart. He had become good friends with Dick Losh, and a lot of drugs started entering the picture, according to my mom. 

“I was feeling frozen out,” she says.