This blog was born on Valentine’s Day, the day after my parent’s wedding anniversary. Too bad they’re not still together. I wonder if older parents realize how much it hurts their grown children when they look at each other with so much love, even as they realize they can’t live together.

For the record, I think they do.

When my mother left my father (and the house me, my two sisters and one of my two brothers still lived in with my family) I was a month shy of 26, the age my mother got married. I had just married my boyfriend a year earlier than planned, in secret, because he was about to be deported and I’d just found out that all his citizenship papers were forgeries.

The day I was planning on telling my parents what happened, was the day my mother walked out. I wouldn’t tell them about it for ten years. I still haven’t actually sat my father down and told him, he just knows. I only sat my mother down and actually told her this year.

My excuse for not telling them isn’t that they split up that day. Though I was in shock I could have told them the next day or the next year. It’s a lot more complex than that – essentially, my play-house-until-we-were-ready-to-really-get-married-husband started treating me as his real wife. I wasn’t ready. I told him that before we got married.

I wanted to be married to him and the marriage was genuine. But I wanted to ease into acting married. I wanted him to really propose to me at some point in the starter marriage, and for us to have a real wedding with all my family when we were ready.

But it didn’t work out that way. Before I knew it the marriage was over. I was ashamed. I didn’t want to tell Anyone. I just wanted to move on.

I’d told my brothers and sisters just in case something happened to me. And that’s probably where the clues came from to my parents – I don’t think anyone ratted me out, but my parents could always tell when we were all in cahoots.