Todos mis Children

I understand now how the choices i made for myself, starting about the time i graduated high school, would create a life that my children would have to share in, at least until their time to create their own life.

On occasion i have regreted not finishing college in order to go into a good paying career; for them, not for me, but that's as far as i go with regrets.

It surprises me that my father's choices in life did not cause me and my sisters more grief growing up. It may have been the distance between Burkburnett and Matamoros that saved us.

Eventually, though, father's children from the woman he chose not to marry showed up. It was 1988, dad wound up in the hospital with a clogged artery; that year he had two medical procedures done to unclog it, that's when they showed up. It was the woman my age, or older, and her younger brother. They did not come to the house, of course, they mostly stayed in Wichita Falls. The details of that visit are unimportant to me, so i'll skip them; i'll just say that i met them, i was civil, they were civil, i mostly ignored them when they were around, and they left.

One of the last things that my mother said to me, literally on her deathbed, was that she thought it would be best for everyone that, when she was gone, dad should sell the house and go live with his other family in Matamoros; she knew they wanted him. I'm a little surprised they didn't hate him, after all, he chose my mother to marry and bring to the U.S. I guess it didn't hurt that he came with a Social Security check.

Mom left us in 1995. Father did not sell the house, but 4 or 5 years later he went down to Matamoros and married the mother of his illigitimate children. He came back by himself, and he never told me he'd done that; he told my wife, Trish. I can only theorize that if he'd had a legtimate reason for this marrige, he would have no trouble telling me himself; he would expect that telling me would have provoked  questions from me with difficult answers. When Trish told me, i could only laugh;
i never brought it up with dad, it was his life. He was 78 or 79 years old, for heaven's sake; i say live and let live.

A year or so later the new wife and daughter showed up, at the house this time. Dad said very little about it, they were there, thats all. They attended the Mexican baptist church in Wichita Falls, not dads church. They stayed a few months and then went back to Matamoros; dad didn't say much about it, they'd left, that's all.