8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee

Author:Mirinae Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

The 7th Life

Confessions of an Ordinary Marriage

2006

ROUSSEAU

Aimé Adel once said that marriage is a trip from the extraordinary to the ordinary.

An ongoing process of discovering, drop by drop, that what you once believed to be so special is nothing but mediocre. It sounds a lot like how my mother described the end of her relationship with my father – how all the things she had once found original and exciting about him turned out to be just the run-of-the-mill flags of a womanizer. A sad, pathetic cliché, she said.

The confident way he asked for her hand on their first date. The bold way he got her nickname tattooed on his inner biceps on their third date. The suave way he made her slow-dance with him, barefoot, on the hood of his secondhand Cadillac, to “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine),” on their fifth.

All those special moments, however, were never solely hers. It turned out Father had acted out the same script with quite a few other women as well – he had even recycled the tattooed sobriquet Mon Petit Chardonneret, My Little Goldfinch, for at least four. The latest of those girls was a local stripper named Angela Diabola. When I was nine, Father left us for the strange-named girl.

Not long after my father left us, God left me as well.

I grew up in a religious family. My grandparents had been missionaries in their youth and my mother brought me to church every Sunday. As a little child I had a literal faith in the Bible, as did most kids raised in a firm Christian environment. One of my favorite passages from the Bible was Matthew 17:20: For verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Like Philip in Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, who had absolute faith in God that He would fix his club foot, I believed He would return my father to my mother and me if I prayed with all my sincerity. So just as little Philip did, I set the date for receiving God’s miracle, and I prayed. The waiting was exhilarating. I had no doubt God would grant my wish for I knew having absolute faith in His power was the sole qualification for His miracle. Harboring even a sliver of doubt was to butcher my own blessing in the making. And since my faith was absolute, just as Philip’s was, the dejection I felt a month later on the morning of the planned miracle was also absolute. In the story Philip’s club foot is never cured, and in my childhood my father never returned to us.

Quickly my literal faith in God unraveled. My faith in the Church as a community, however, continued. People from my grandparents’ church helped us through the difficult time: they visited our house frequently to make sure we had enough food while my depressed mother spent most of her days in bed.

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