Yesterday, December 5^th, is as gone as the life of a pig farmer who nearly changed my life.

Brown, plaid, and in every house in America in the 80’s was the chair where I clung to my mom and tried to understand why my daddy wasn’t coming back. It is my earliest memory, and the start of my changing family.

My dad remarried and we became a split unit of four with weekends divvied up and holidays traded.
This was my worldview until about fourth grade. The year a flame-haired boy brought a condom to school and showed all of us aghast and giggling 10-year olds in the back of the room by the books what they actually looked like: gross. The year my best friend in class got glasses and I became recklessly jealous to the point of lying at my eye exam soon after. The year I first became self-conscious about my growling stomach before lunch, especially sitting next to Flame-Hair who seemed eons ahead in all things worldly and mature.

But it was also the year my mom did something quite unlike my mom. She feathered and sprayed her bangs, gathered her courage, and went on a blind date. With a farmer. A, PIG farmer. 

This, of course, is my version. And this is what I know of the events.

He wasn’t what I expected, probably because he wasn’t my dad and yet was a man allowed to hold hands with my mom in the gleam of the car dashboard, kiss her around the corner far from where they thought I was standing, and with the power to bring a stock of Pepsi and Nutty Bars to our cabinets. Which wasn’t allowed ever. EVER. It was a strange series of transitions. One that scared and excited me.

I remember his moustache and how fast his mouth moved when he auctioned. I remember how he sang Garth Brooks and knew his way around a farm like a worm in the dirt. I remember fall, and driving around rural Missouri for leaves of every species on my science project list that were then sealed between old picture album pages.

I got real, authentic ropers (hick talk for boots), and a short whip for showing hogs at fair. I got sisters, and new cousins who lived just a house down the road. I got a trampoline (a moment of silence here) that I apparently knew less about than he. It only took one instance of his perfectly timed jumping to catapult me like a broken arrow straight in the air, and have me pleading for my life. I got more family.

Almost.

After school one day in December, I walked in my house to find a tissue, and my mom’s face smushed behind it. Beside her were two or three very close friends. My gut rocked and I wanted nothing more than to find an empty house with only pretzels and mustard for snacks and consecutive reruns of Save By The Bell and Full House until my mom got off work. Please, can we just do that day instead of this one?

We didn’t know he was sick. We didn’t know he’d stopped taking his medication. We didn’t know he was a prisoner of his own thoughts and that his greatest idea for relief would be a tower of hay bales and a rope. We didn’t know.

The months that followed were difficult to say the least. Books with titles like, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, started showing up around her dresser. Apples and peanut butter went on hold while she closed her hollow wooden doors and sobbed choking cries, her wedding dress limp and empty on a hanger in the closet.

No child should have to hear that. And no mother should have to be that heartbroken.

I talked to her today, nineteen years later. I’d forgotten details, she’d forgotten it was the 5^th until it was already the 6^th.

We are here. We did survive it. And although I don’t know what the plan would have been, or should have been, I know that I may not have had as many weekends hunting, golfing, fishing, and lazing with my dad if she’d remarried. I may not have ever gone to college at sixteen. I may never have met the one freshman student who took my breath away. I may have not changed my last name or had three kids or lived in my favorite place in the world. She may not have come on that journey with me.

So whatever the plan was, we’re okay with the new one now.