Love Against the Odds

Deeper Than Cleaver

Despite decades of disillusionment, we're all still encouraged to believe that everyone in 1950s America just stepped out of Leave It to Beaver. But my parents really did.

Whatever was expected of a bright, young, middle-class pair of newlyweds, they came through: My dad worked his way up the ladder at JC Penney (to whom he gave the kind of devotion nobody would dream of giving a major corporation today); my mom went through a variety of hairstyles while running an immaculate household; they both spent the rest of their lives raising four children. On their wedding day in the summer of 1962, they looked like what I imagine was the official mandate for couples getting married in the summer of 1962: Be sleek, be stunning, be full of a vibrant sense of your potential for complete and utter contentment—and don't forget the '50s.

Mom and Dad came into their adulthood in a time when the sight of a handsome young man with a naughty sneer swiveling his hips to a rock 'n' roll song was considered shocking. It was back when you could actually use the word "shocking" because, supposedly, not much ever was. And this, I think, was OK with my folks. I remember hearing some story once about how my dad and a buddy had ruined someone's science experiment in college by stealing their chickens and letting them loose in the dorms, but aside from that he was a very respectable guy. My mom drove across the country to San Francisco with her best girlfriend, which was carefree enough but culminated in her fateful meeting with Dad and falling in love while Tony Bennett's famous ode to the city played in the background. Life certainly wasn't meant to be shocking, and how were people supposed to stay hitched and raise a bunch of kids, anyway, if they had to constantly look over their shoulders for the threat of the unconventional?

They didn't have to look over their shoulders, because the unconventional hit them in the face. My older brother, Todd, was the child you want to have first—he was smart, funny, good-looking, well-liked, and excelled in gym, before faithfully joining the JC Penney ranks. Shannon was next, and she, too, was smart, funny, good-looking, well-liked, and excelled in gym; she also went through a variety of lean, sporty girlfriends before becoming a police sergeant and settling down with a very attractive woman on a ranch in Reno. I followed Shannon's birth two years later, told my third-grade teacher that I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Farrah Fawcett-Majors (well, who wouldn't? She was a gifted young actress on a hit show married to the Six Million Dollar Man), and finally graduated from college after seven years of sleeping with anyone who didn't have a vagina. My younger sister, Leighann, as she'd always planned, got married and had three adorable boys of her own—after a few healthy years of exploring the kind of liberation that, purportedly, no woman in the '50s ever desired and that probably single-handedly caused my father's gray hair.

What has always struck me the most about all of this is how the perfect black-and-white snapshot of the perfect life faded so gradually, and how defiantly, how lovingly, my parents allowed color to come into the picture. I won't say that there weren't days and nights—oh, and many of them, my friends—of melodramatic proclamations and slamming doors; I wet myself when I remember I used to tell my mom and dad that I'd bet they wouldn't be proud of me "even if I won an Oscar!"

They survived the onslaught of a non-sitcom existence because, well, they so clearly stood by their commitment of love for each other and so determinedly proved to us that we were included as a part of that promise, however complicated it became. My parents honestly believed that the world was essentially a good place filled with good people, and unlike a lot of others who still blindly follow an ideal, they didn't leave the definition of "good" for anyone else to decide. Cleaver material though they seemed to be, they were real.

Steve Wiecking

Matched Set

I've always identified very closely with my father; the apple does not fall far from the tree, and everyone who knows us can see that. It's not just that we have the same unusually large eyes or that we share the same questioning, analytic mind, or even that we both tear up over "Mr. Bojangles" and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—it's just that, quite simply, I have always been my father's daughter. And then eight years ago, he returned from a random trip to Southeast Asia and called me in New York to tell me he had a new wife and two young sons. By the time he got to the part about how he had been corresponding with this woman for some time prior to his trip—how he had "met" her through a magazine published with the intent of connecting Filipino women with American men, well, you could have knocked me over just by looking at me the wrong way. It just wasn't what I was expecting.