Tea With Dad by Nancie Laird Young

Author:Nancie Laird Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

—JOAN DIDION, Where I Was From

CHAPTER 15

Full Disclosure

ONE SATURDAY or Sunday after a short road trip to “just get out of the house,” Dad and I sat at a table at one of the many diners on the Eastern Shore and enjoyed a cup of tea with dessert: ice cream sundae for him, Smith Island cake for me. We watched some kids run back and forth from the arcade games in the lobby to their parents’ table for more quarters.

“Do you ever think of going out with someone again? Don’t you miss having a companion?”

I was not only surprised that my father—the man who to me growing up had seemed determined I would be with no male person and who knew my history—asked this question, but also by the vehemence of my response, “NO! I do not.”

Both of us were taken aback by my reaction.

“Well,” he laughed, “you don’t have to get mad about it.”

“Dad,” I said, softening my tone, “why would I want or need to get involved with anyone at this stage in my life? I’ve been married twice. I’m batting zero. Obviously, I’m not good at marriage.”

“You’re just not good at choosing husbands,” he corrected me.

I frowned at him, paused, and then said, “I don’t agree. I think they were both good men at heart. They and I just weren’t as good at handling things as we might have wanted to be.”

Years of thinking about it all had made me realize that they were each as good a prospect for marriage as I was back then.

“I’m not sorry I married either of them. I’m sorry that the marriages and the relationships afterward didn’t work out. But anyway, I’ve been married. I’ve had my children. They’re grown. I have grandchildren. I have my friends. I have my writing. My solitude. I have you. What else do I need?”

He looked at me, unconvinced. But nodded at me anyway.

Truth be told, I never thought about having another man in my life. Since the last marriage ended, as a reaction rather than a well-thought-out decision, I’d just accepted, if not decided, that I would never date again, let alone remarry. I began to think about why.

Most of my divorced or widowed friends were still filling out online dating profiles or getting matched up with someone by other friends. I just hadn’t been interested. Was it because I hadn’t seen anyone that interested me? Was I low on hormones? Why did people think women had to have a partner? My mother had referred to it as “Noah’s Ark Syndrome.”

Sometimes I worried that I was being selfish. I liked solitude. When people asked me if I missed having a man in my life, someone to care about or to care about me I answered, “I have been lucky to genuinely fall in love with two men and marry them. It was wonderful while it lasted.

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