Susan Senator

(MOM AND DAD DO NOT READ THIS BLOG POST!!!)

This weekend we are traveling to my childhood home in Connecticut to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Laura and I have organized the party, and invited over 100 guests from all parts of my parents’ long life together. Yesterday I bought all new clothes for my four men, and I’ve been running around trying to pull together a decent look for me.

The biggest effort so far, however, has gone into the toast I want to make for them. I have never been this stymied before. I have gone through five drafts trying to get the right tone, capture the feel of my parents’ relationship, all within a 4 minute speech.

I am sharing with you what I will read on Sunday:

What makes a marriage last half a century? I only have an inkling, being in my 24th year of marriage myself. I can’t think of Mom and Dad that way, as 50-year-marriage veterans, however. They’re just Mom and Dad. Two fixtures in my life, a unit that has always functioned pretty much the same way. They sometimes feel like interchangeable parts, even though they are so different from one another.

As a kid, I could never get away with playing one off against the other. If Mom said “No,” there was no running to Dad for the Yes. Even if they were in different rooms, or one at work and one home, they would somehow know. Like there was a telepathy, a sixth or sick sense of what was going on in the family. Or “What does Mommy say?” would be the first thing out of Dad’s mouth. Maybe that’s the key: Loyalty to each other.

My parents took that loyalty and tweaked it to its most intense, almost neurotic level. If Dad wanted us to do some incredibly ridiculous, slay-this-dragon and then climb seven mountains kind of chore, Mom would back him up. Dad has a specific idea of how each job was to be done, and if you tried to take short cuts like scattering the grass clippings around instead of making piles and collecting them up with the wheelbarrow, he would know and you would have to redo it. One time he told me to count all the logs in a cord of wood that had just been delivered. “I want to make sure the guy gave me the right amount,” he said. But I was a teenager. I thought he was kidding. I thought this was insane. No pointing appealing to Mom. She’d roll her eyes about Dad but — Later on he asked me how many and I had make up a number. To this day I think Dad is annoyed that I didn’t really count the logs! Mom thinks the whole thing’s funny and crazy, but I can tell that she also deep down believes I should have really counted them.

There you have it: Loyalty to your mate. And it worked both ways. Sometime in my teenage years I started hanging out in the kitchen with Mom while she made dinner. Mom was into healthy, ethnic eating long before it was fashionable. I would watch and help while she concocted some wild, exotic kind of meal, so excited and optimistic about keeping us healthy food while exposing us to unusual things. The high point of those days was when Mom made a dish she claimed was African, called “Babootie,” which somehow contained both banana and hamburger meat. Dad – though he hates eating most kinds of beef — knew what it meant to Mom to take care of us this way, and so he would breathe down our necks making sure we would eat it and be kind to our mother about it.

In many ways, this is also about how a family works. Mom and Dad figured it out as they went along, like we all do. But to Laura and me, it appeared pretty seamless. Every summer they took us on a fantastic vacation: four times we went on long cross-country camping trips out West. Other times we’d go to Maine or the Cape or Montauk, depending on our age and level of adolescent crankiness. One year my parents planned a new trip, to Nova Scotia. Laura and I were okay enough with it, and we listened one night as Dad laid out the trip to us. But suddenly Dad stopped and said, “Hey. Do we really want to do this?” We looked at each other. We looked at him. No, we kind of didn’t. “So how about if we go Out West again instead?” Dad asked. We didn’t even have to stop and think. The next thing I knew, the Nova Scotia trip had been scrapped and we were going Out West again! Just like that. I loved the spontaneity, the youthful impulsiveness of that moment.

Whatever we did, it felt magical. I can say that with all honesty. The unfolding of the country’s terrain as we crossed into states we’d only read about was nothing short of breathtaking. But equally enchanting and sweet was the comfort of returning year after year to the soft sands and shining skies of Cape Cod. Wherever we went, Mom and Dad really seemed to have everything under control, from keeping grizzlies out of our camp site to teaching us how to jump the waves at the Cape, to grilling new boyfriends and setting our curfews. And from walking us down the aisle to walking around with each new baby. Mom’s soft eyes and big heart and Dad’s jokes and confidence cradled us and led us safely through the years as a family.

Mom and Dad’s working as yin and yang together did not stop at our childhood. I’ll never forget when I told Mom and Dad about Nat’s diagnosis. My world was threatening to come apart. What did this mean, I wondered, about us, about Nat? But Dad simply said, “Well, he’s still our Nat.” And Mom went out and bought up every developmental toy and engaging book she could lay her hands on, and to this day she sends me every article that was ever written on autism, including my own!

You know, I think that there’s one more bit of marriage wisdom that is strictly and completely Mel and Shelly: When all else fails, laugh. I asked Mom the other day what was one major ingredient to their particular 5-Decade Layer cake and she said, “I try to keep the peace.” Then, without missing a beat, she added, “Though Dad would disagree. ” And she laughed her Shelly laugh.

Then I asked Dad what he thought was the key to 50 years of marriage. “That long already?” He asked. Then he added, with his voice all soft and squooshy, “The love in her heart. She is just such a lovely person.”

Well, here’s to you, Mom and Dad. May you have another 50 for new adventures, cords of wood, strange dinners, and laughs, together!