soopastryheart

“27 years ago,” my mom pauses, as if to prepare for some earth-shattering declaration of wisdom. “I made the biggest mistake of my life marrying your father.”

“He wasn’t wealthy,” she continues. “And he most certainly wasn’t good-looking.”

I ask her why she married him.

“I have no idea. Really, not the slightest.”

Thus is the foundation of my parents’ relationship, a marriage that celebrates its 27^th year today.

She tells him that if it weren’t for the kids, she would have left him a long time ago. But then she retracts, saying that she couldn’t leave him to starve on his own, that the Catholic in her wouldn’t allow it. He can’t even tell the difference between frozen chicken and a block of mozzarella (why we keep shredded cheese in the freezer is an entirely different issue). She still gives him haircuts. He doesn’t know how to use the washing machine. He’d turn into a Grizzly man within a month. She couldn’t have that on her conscience, she says.

And my dad only nods. He doesn’t even look hurt, as if he’s completely accepted this as a truth.

“I don’t really know why your mother chose to marry me either.”

And then my mom tells me a story I’ve heard no less than four times a year. She had options – better options in fact; a suitor who was a total gentleman. He was kind, successful, and didn’t have hair that resembled a chia pet. But for one reason or another, she didn’t choose him, she chose my dad.

“I must have had some psychotic break.”

Looking at the two of them, I can only tell you all the ways they should be incompatible. She’s patient. He can’t sit still. She plans. He regrets. He’s loud and forgetful. She finds what he’s lost and then ridicules him. They had polar opposite childhoods: he grew up malnourished and poor and she carried around a leather backpack. Her family has always been tight-knit, and his was (and continues to be) a dysfunctional circus act.

He can often be juvenile; pretending to push her in the pool, spraying her with the hose when they’re gardening together, and scaring her with snakes he’s found in the yard. My mom has a pretty intense case of ophidiophobia – he once brought a dead snake into the house (“for the laughs!”) and she locked herself in the laundry room, inducing a full blown panic attack. She screams and spits out all sorts of Korean profanities (all of which she claims to have learned after marrying my dad). It’s not a rare occurrence to see her chasing him around the house waving a wooden spatula in the air.

But then I see them holding hands walking through the Costco parking lot. He makes sure she takes her daily vitamins, and she makes him his favorite bread twice a month. He wanders into the kitchen and offers to help with anything, knowing full well she’ll shoo him away. They’re both stubborn and driven as hell. They decided their official occupations would always be parents, and everything else would be a supplemental hobby. They both agreed from the get-go to put their kids first, above everything else, to love and support us (emotionally and financially) for as long as God would allow.

Somehow, despite their differences, for some twisted reason or another, it works. I don’t know the secret. I don’t know the formula. I don’t think it exists. I don’t know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but I know it can’t be all that bad.

It works. God help them, but it does. Happy 27^th.