The High Cost of Being Dumb

How my Boomer Parents Repeatedly Snatched Financial Defeat from the Jaws of Fiscal Security

“You want to hear it? You want to hear me say it? Fine! Fine. I’ll say it. You don’t satisfy me sexually. There. I said it. Is that what you wanted?”

It started as an ugly whisper fight. One snide comment followed by a nasty murmur in response, then sick things hissed at one another that no child should hear, escalating until finally my mom was shouting at the top of her lungs that the reason she cheated on my dad was so that she could have an orgasm. We were, of course, at Disneyland huddled up with strangers in the line to Splash Mountain. Music and lights everywhere. Happy families and overpriced food. Characters in costumes eager to meet smiling children. Moms and dads trying to figure out if they should say something.

Why my parents decided to start arguing about my mother’s infidelity in the line at an amusement park, I’ll never fully understand even if I can explain it as an observer. Simply, they hated each other, they were broke, and the magnificent surroundings forced them to confront their deep unhappiness with their chosen lives. When you live in a gray town where it rains all the time you can pretend the problem is external. At Disneyland, this was all but impossible.

I don’t think I even looked at my father for his reaction. I just leaned against part of the cool concrete facade of the fake mountain and wished I was somewhere else. My guess is that I was somewhere around eight or nine years old.

The hell of it is, I remember this story not for its ugliness but for its total inappropriate hilarity. It doesn’t stand out as remarkably stressful. Things like it had happened too many times. It was embarrassing, but no more than a hundred other public fights they’d engaged in over the years. If you’ve ever had a television remote control that has been used too many times, so that you go to change the volume and suddenly the input channel changes instead, or to change the channel and suddenly you’re on Netflix, my emotions at that age worked in much the same way. Too much wrong stimulus. Too much inappropriate behavior. Buttons pressed too many times until they broke. Nothing inside my skull felt like it was mapped to respond to normality.

This remains my best test to determine if public outbursts by parents are one-off incidents to vent stress, or part of a pattern of behavior. If I look at the kids are they horrified or are they just kinda over it?

I was over it.

While the details of their subsequent exchange are lost to my memory, when my dad started to leave the line I knew it was time to make “the Decision.” The Decision came up on every family vacation when my parents could no longer tolerate each other. My mom would take the money, whether that was traveler’s checks or the single credit card that “still had money on it.” My dad would take the hotel room keys, and maybe the rental car keys, if we had one. Nobody had a cellphone yet. Every family vacation involved making “the Decision” at least several times.

The Decision is easy to explain but it connects my family’s complicated emotional reality to its strange financial underpinnings. Mom or dad? Would you rather have a place to go or would you rather have something to eat? My sister usually went with my dad and my brother and I stayed with my mom. We had bigger appetites and my mom usually broke down and went back to the hotel before one or two in the morning, anyway.

Some variation of this happened in Mexico. It happened in Hawaii, which was early in the list of places we vacationed and before I was “over it.” While I held some stupid goddamn parrot for a picture on the beach, my parents screamed at one another that this was it and they were going to get a divorce for real this time. That was a walk-away fight, where they sort of turn and spin, come back, and then walk further away routine so they could get louder and louder to be heard. I think some hapless dad from another family asked them both to calm down, which I was thankful for if only because it caused them to both turn on him and temporarily reunite long enough to leave the beach together. I lost four of my baby molars on that vacation from stress which had not even been loose when we boarded the plane. Stuff like this happened at Disneyland… each of the approximately twelve times we went there as a family. As their marriage continued to evaporate, my mother and father’s appetite for vacations exponentially increased.

You are presently making some assumptions about wealth. The reality is much more bizarre than you are probably imagining. I will clarify. Both my parents were employed. On paper they each made an average income. We went on vacation every year. Sometimes twice. But we absolutely could not, in any universe you could even squint at, afford even a single one of them. The reason they could afford vacations is because they could afford absolutely nothing else.