In the late Autumn of 1969, my parents -newly dating- took a trip to Syracuse to visit a friend. The trip included a football game in the bitter cold (Syracuse played Penn State – PSU won.), for which my mother was unprepared. So my father bought her a pea coat at an army navy store. Twenty years leater she gave the coat to me. It was already well worn and had a few tears in the lining, but it had held up extremely well. I wore it for the first time to a birthday party at a park, which if I’m not mistaken, may have been exactly eightteen years ago today. A friend was turning fifteen or sixteen, and wanted to have an outdoor party; her birthday was late in the year, so she had never had one. I loved the idea, and I loved that group of friends. I was a freshman in high school, and I had been hanging out with them since the end of September. They were the first group of people with whom I felt that I really belonged. We toasted marshmallows over a fire in a barbeque pit, and boiled water for hot chocolate. The pea coat smelled like a campfire, not only that afternoon, but for probably fifteen years after. I wore it often through high school, college, and my twenties (except for the times when I got heavy and it didn’t fit).
I stopped buying new wool coats in 2002 when I went vegan, and within a few years had cycled all of the wool out of my wardrobe, except for the pea coat. Eventually I stopped wearing it, mostly because once I stopped wearing wool I realized that I was probably allergic to it. But I couldn’t get rid of that coat. When we moved earlier this year, I gave the coat back to my mom and decided to let her decide what to do with it. She said she wasn’t going to wear it, and asked it I wanted it back. I wasn’t sure. She hung it on the back door of her guest room. I couldn’t decide the last time I was there, or on my trip back there this weekend. It would probably fit really well now. I decided to decide the next time.
I also decided to wait until next time to tell both of my parents that it’s time for them to get divorced. I have made my opinion known about that countless times before, but I realized that I needed to tell them again not because they’ve been separated for over seven years, own their own homes, and my father has been living with his girlfriend for well over a year and it’s enough already, but because it’s time for them to do this for me, that I need them to sign the papers so I can move on with my life, and put away all of the lousy decisions I made while I was dealing with their separation. But I decided to wait, because a birthday dinner with my father just wasn’t the right time, and my mother probably already knows this anyway. In the car on the way back home yesterday, it occurred to me that as nice as all of this sounds, it’s not really up to them to wrap this up for me. It would be nice, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter when or if they ever make it legal. It’s my problem.
In an email this afternoon, my mom (who I know is reading this) told me that she was having some nostalgia issues with the coat, so she cut off the buttons and kept them, then put the coat in the give-away pile. I have felt sick and depressed since. I could take the coat back and have the buttons sewn back on. I could take one of the buttons and put it in my jewelry box. I could do nothing. I know it’s just a thing, and I know it’s unhealthy to be attached to things, but knowing that she cut off the buttons was far more traumatic than the thought of finding out a month from now that she had let it go intact.
