Confessions of a misplaced home?

When I was sixteen years old, my mother began seeing other men. 'Other', meaning not my father; 'my father', meaning her jaded husband. There was no deceit involved, never the behind-his-back affair. It was not her way--she was always very open about her infidelity. Wanted to share it with the family. Encouraged him to pursue similar past-times. She was so caught-up in the illicit excitement of all of it, or so I tend to think, that she never particularly focused enough to see the daily hearts being bruised. Thought this "new development" of their "relationship" would ultimately prove a deeper bonding between her and my father; as a transcendental step in their evolution.

She believed this, I believe, wholeheartedly. Even when she moved four-hundred miles away from him, "temporarily" leaving her kids and the only home they'd ever known, to take a new job in the same city as her at-the-time lover. Even now, she thinks she believed we would all have been able--let alone willing--to follow her. The fact that there were five of us kids, three dogs, a cat, & two cars living in a house that still needed to be re-hauled, cleaned up, and sold in the wake of her absence, somehow didn't seem to stop or strike her as unlikely odds. Even so, I can't help believing her: we just never crossed her mind.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/17/09)