The summer heat continues on, it is often too hot for people to be outside long until the evening hours when the sun's heat is fading behind the tall evergreen trees. My son is at a friend's house and I feel his absence in the quiet house as the AC unit drones on and my steps echo down the hall way. The isolation of our small family can hit hard. Suddenly, a wave of sadness gripped me, and the powerful song I first heard at 22, " Nobody Wins", by Elton John started singing in my head. I heard it the first time I realized my parents ' marriage was turning into a nightmare, and we were all going to pay the price as their four children :
" They must have loved each other once
But that was many years ago
And by the time I came along
Things were already going wrong
I felt the pain in their pretense
The side they tried hard not to show
But through the simple eyes of youth
It wasn't hard to see the truth"...
The chorus is heartbreaking, and chills me to the core, to this day:
"And in the end nobody wins
When love begins to fall apart
And it's the innocent who pay
When broken dreams get in the way
The game begins, the game nobody wins"...
By the time my mother was done tearing her marriage apart, my youngest sister committed suicide, my other younger sister died of cancer at age 44, my brother's marriage was destroyed, my father died alone in an Alzheimer's institute in Belgium after she kicked him out 7 years before that, my brother and I became permanently estranged, and she died from complications of a lifetime of alcohol abuse. I struggled with the trauma of loss, betrayal, anger, and the fear I would not be able to escape my parents' awful marriage, and my in- laws disastrous marriage. My husband and I have been married 29 years, and it remains difficult at times to believe we are OK, as the ghosts of his and my parents haunt us off and on, the doubt, the fear, the sadness.
Elton John goes on in the sad ballad to show the fruits of love gone wrong:
" They must have loved each other once
Before the magic slipped away
And as their life became a lie
What love remained began to die
I used to hide beneath the sheets
I prayed that time would find a way
But with the passing of the years
I watched as laughter turned to tears"...
I remember my mother screaming at my father in her drunken rages, when I was already an adult, 26, taking a semester break from graduate school, to try to help my parents' miserable relationship. It is horrible when children get torn apart, no matter what age, when their parents' marriage turns to dust and ashes. My mother roped me in, and manipulated me into her narcissistic games, it was exhausting, and in the end , she threw me away like I was a used Kleenex tissue. It was devastating to my already shaky self confidence. I put myself back together, for the most part, with a lot of time, and a couple of years of therapy, but the damage, though invisible, is real. The hardest part remains to stay vigilant and make sure I do not set up traps for myself , my husband and our 23 year old son, that get us stuck in the same swamp of my parents' and my in-laws marriage disasters, keeping our love for each other alive and healthy:
" We used to love each other once
With all the passion we possessed
But people change as time goes by
Some feelings grow while others die
But if we learn from what we see
And face the truth while we still can
Then though the passion may be gone
Some kind of love can still live on"...
The song is a strong reminder to me to stay alert, to be aware of my own weaknesses incurred under the regime of my parents' sick marriage. The chorus is powerful, and reminds me of how important it is to be determined to break those chains from the past, to make sure the damage to my son remains minimal, because it is so devastatingly true that " And in the end nobody wins
When love begins to fall apart And it's the innocent who pay When broken dreams get in the way
The game begins, the game nobody wins"...
Elton John's song is a powerful, powerful message, one anyone caught in that web of parental marriage dysfunction can learn from.
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