#sometimes it's wonderful that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

metalmaul · 9 months

Note

🌻 sup

hello hello I still have your discord message to reply to but I have been so not in the headspace for For Real conversation for what feels like 4 days but has probably been more like 4 weeks. I'm sorry. this happens with me a lot you will come to know. i think you're very cool and still very much want to be better pals still, I am just brain cursed etc.

anyways, I keep typing out these way too oversharey too-fucking-long rambling derailing the actual story posts for this for like HOURS AT A TIME. I'm very skilled in wasting time this way.

but I am going to try again to just. tell. this one story. with minimal background. note: I definitely failed at this, this is still 70000 miles long, but it's getting fuckig posted I said a thing I did it

this is a tale of a teacher that worked at my middle school that had known both of my parents closely when she was young, but had no idea that they got together and had children, and I got to tell her that happened with my existence in front of her as very tangible proof

under a readmore for courtesy reasons

so, as briefly as I can this time, I won't go into all of the reasons, but the fact that my parents got married and had children is what I refer to as a "cosmic fluke."

quick-facts

1.) they only hooked up because they vaguely found each other entertaining at parties. my mom is not really very attracted to my dad physically, my dad probably is attracted to my mom but at that time he actually had a huge thing for her friend and not her. my mom was only supposed to be in her home state for a short, temporary amount of time, and fully intended to go back to several states away where she had been building her own life already. she was real young and probably just wanted to have fun— definitely had NO plans on any long-term shacking up with my dad of all people, but, as with many cases of youth, there was a surprise pregnancy involved. marriage followed, and another child (me :]) they considered having another child, but 4 year old me told them not to do that lmfao.

2.) my father is not even remotely close to my mother's type. she has never dated anyone else similar to him at all. we have even discussed this before. he is the "one of these things is not like the others" on her permanent record and he just happens to be the guy she was married with children with. there is no possibility that she ever will date anyone like him ever again. my dad, well, he could date someone else like my mom, but I'm certain that would not last very long.

3.) my mom comes from a no-money, broke-ass, hillbilly, HUGE, Loudly Dysfunctional family. my dad comes from a very financially stable, stuck-up, standards so high that they can't even reach them, we're better than you, small, Quietly Dysfunctional family. they were and still are worlds away from each other despite being in close physical proximity.

from point 3: if one were to know these things, like the teacher in the story I'm going to tell, of Who my mom's family were, and Who my dad's parents are, they would have to assume that there would be No Fucking Chance In Hell that my dad's parents would have been kind, accepting, and/or welcoming to my mother were they to find out she would be the mother of their first ever grandchildren. this assumption would be correct, because they were not nice to her!! (over time, they came around to her for completely different reasons & at different points, but my parents have been split up for 2 decades & the damage is done.)

4.) my parents do not embody "opposites attract;" rather, they're a pretty telling story of how you should have enough in common with a partner that you can share more together than a handful of TV shows you both agree on, some foods, and select bands that everyone who liked rock music in the 1990s liked anyway. maybe that seems like enough things, but trust me, this is not enough things, and they're not important enough things. additionally, my dad has not gained almost any interests at all since 1991. there are some new TV shows he likes. there are some new foods that he's tried. the guy does not get into stuff. my mother gets into something entirely fucking random bi-weekly and then gets bored of it, sometimes abandoning it forever, sometimes looping back around. sometimes, her new interests actually stick and become the gates of a new era of what the fuck she's got going on. considering they did not have very much in common to begin with, my mom found my dad's interests stale and even irritating very quickly, whereas my dad cannot keep up with my mom even a little bit and finds that to be very annoying. these two have served as a poster child in my life of two people who have no fucking chemistry whatsoever. they do have love for each other, though, but it's not the kind of love that a romantic relationship requires. there's never going to be a spark there.

from point 4: here's an additional short story that my mom loves to tell me and I love to re-tell before we get to the actual story. when i was about 5 years old, my parents, my brother, and myself were sitting in the car together. nothing was really happening, but i was always a quiet observational child, and I had been looking at my parents in front of me for some amount of time. out of nowhere, I said to them "you two have nothing in common with each other." this is a story that I don't personally remember, but I definitely believe I said. it has haunted my mother since it happened, possibly my father too but I don't want to ask him. can of worms. at the time, neither of them knew what to say, and I guess things became quieter and more awkward. this story is the kind of thing I feel like I'm going to miss out on by not having kids; I want the fabric of my soul torn apart in that way only a child can make happen. BUT, the fact was that I was completely right about it. I mean, if a kid who's hardly been on the planet can make that kind of observation, it's like an inevitable death sentence for your failing marriage. in some respect, I saw that these two people were not into each other, but of course i didn't understand the full extent of what that meant at the time. they sure did. probably anyone around them did.

possibly, people they hadn't spoken to in what felt like a lifetime ago wouldn't even be able to put those pieces into a fitting puzzle, which brings us finally to the story.

HOW I GOT TO BE SOMEONE'S MINOR EXISTENTIAL CRISIS FOR A DAY AND NEVER SAW HER EVER AGAIN

back when I was in middle school, there was a teacher that was a stand-out amongst my friends that had her.

my school did that thing where they separate the students into smaller groups— they did it by color, so there was like the "blue" 7th graders and the "gold" 7th graders, etc.

if my friends and i weren't in the same color unit, the only times I would see them during the day would be at lunch or sometimes gym classes. otherwise, we'd be on totally opposite sides of the building.

the school wasn't very big (we were crammed like fucking sardines in there, actually, it was way too fucking small,) but these divisions were enough that you were pretty unlikely to meet core subject teachers that you didn't have if they weren't on the same side as you.

this was the case with this beloved teacher that I had heard so much about at the time. frankly, I don't remember any of it, just that they all liked her, which made me feel like she had to be a pretty nice lady.

for some reason or another, I must have mentioned her to my mom at some point. my mom had, like, a spit-take reaction that i know I couldn't have been expecting, and told me that this teacher had the same name of a girl who was, at one point during her childhood, Her Best Friend. she also told me that, if this was the person that she thought it was, she would have Also known my dad, because at a later point in time they were teenaged co-workers.

i don't remember if i told/asked my dad about this back then or several years after when I had finally met her, but I do know at some point I told him about it too and he was also like hunched over distant memory laughing confirming that he had worked with her at one of his first jobs, and it was wild to him too that suddenly his kid was talking about this girl from his past like that.

now, it actually was not uncommon for teachers to have known either side of my family for several reasons. my dad's family is really small, but my health teacher in that school once rattled off every single fucking one of their names to my face in front of the class upon hearing my surname. it's not even a memorable surname, she just knew every single member of my fucking family personally. this sometimes could be incredibly irritating. there was a gym teacher that I guess taught my dad that wasn't even ever my teacher that INSISTED upon calling me his name every time she saw me which pissed me off something royal at the time.

that all being said, this was a little different. there weren't a lot of people who my parents were doing double-takes about like that, particularly in my mom's case where they were best friends for a time.

even more unique was the fact that this teacher knew my parents entirely separately. the points of time that she knew either of them were both before my parents knew each other.

neither of my parents had contacted this woman in decades, and she never knew that these two completely unrelated people to her life ever had kids or got married.

I pocketed that information as intriguing, and it made me want to meet this teacher and talk to her more than I had before when I just figured she was nice, but during my run in middle school it just never happened for various reasons. it wasn't really all that important, but I was a little disappointed about it.

years later, sometime when I was in high school... maybe like junior year, or something? it was probably during finals or something like that because I feel like we had more free time than usual to do something like this... some of my friends who had attended that middle school with me made a plan to walk there after school was out.

our middle school wasn't super close to our high school, but it wasn't too bad of a walk, so off we went.

we had a really nice time, actually. it sucks that my memory is so spotty that I can't remember more clearly who i wound up visiting. i more than likely saw the one teacher there that liked me the best by a long-shot. she bought me the entire twilight series, which I had never expressed any interest in, probably because I was a fucking emo kid and she thought I would like it ahahaha. there were plenty of teachers who did not feel nice things towards me lol. i remember we saw our spanish teacher because he was one of those teachers every kid likes.

my clearest memory of who was super excited to see me and I wasn't really expecting that was one of the librarians. I mean she knew who I was and was so happy I had come by to say hi to her. what's sad is I remember that, but I don't remember anything about her. I don't remember what her name was, what she looked like, and I don't even really remember using the library all that much but I guess I must have. but she gets her own section in this story because she made me feel really special that day. I think my friends had split up with me to see someone else when I went to see her, either that or the kids I was with just weren't as exciting to her as I was, which as I said..... I really didn't expect that at all. there have been a handful of times where that's happened to me with teachers, particularly because I was really a terrible student. I was polite but that's all I had going for me. and I know I didn't turn my library books in on time fucking ever. some people are kind. it was always really nice when somebody gave a shit that I was there to the point of happiness.

anyways, we visited some teachers that my friends had had but I never did, which I just stood quietly and politely alongside them for.

then came the one that had almost got away, the favorite teacher of my friends who did not know me even a little bit, but I Knew Her.

I waited for my pals to catch up with her and all. she really did seem super nice, and I bet she was a great teacher!

i would have liked to have her, although by not having her I did have that other teacher I mentioned that really liked me for no reason and bought me the twilight books at her own personal expense i guess just because i was emo so she thought I would like them. i didn't, but it was nice of her. it's pretty funny to remember that though. she must have been like "this kid has Got to be into twilight" meanwhile all the books I was reading in her class were like... just the regular kind of sad. I really wasn't that big into fantasy back then, and there was that huge boom for it at the time that i basically skipped out on. I only ever read the first twilight book and I swear to god I remember going "that's a good enough ending for me" and never picked up another one in my life lmfao.

anyways, I let my friends catch up with this lady til they were all squared away, and then I decided to introduce myself.

I said something like "hello, you don't know me, but you know my parents." she was obviously "??? go on" type intrigued, as you would be.

then I told her who my parents were, and the LOOK on this poor woman's face trying to melt all of this information together was so fucking priceless.

she kept going like "I never knew they got together.... THEY got MARRIED??"

sis was flabbergasted. she did have a little trip down memory lane talking about my parents, she mentioned the same details that my parents had to me even, although I don't really remember much of that.

mostly just that this was kind of a golden ticket opportunity for my chaotic nature that I got to enact. I love chaos where there's really no harm done, but it does fuck with somebody's brain a little bit enough to throw them off-course for a few minutes. i don't know why I enjoy that, but I do. i hate pranks with a furious passion, but I do like things like this.

i basically rolled into this lady's day to deliver a telegram from her past but in the form of a twilight zone episode. i was the all-too real physical surreal punchline of two people she had once known that came together to make another person that she Never knew about for like 16+ years (with my brother being older than I was, even longer than that) and there was just nothing to do about that other than absorb the information. which I found fun. no ill-will intended, she really did seem super nice. I just couldn't resist that.

I mean, can you imagine if you found out your best friend when you were like 10 years old and the guy you worked at jimmy john's with when you were 16 that had fucking NOTHING to do with each other, AND YOU KNEW THERE HAD TO BE NO FUCKING WAY THEIR FAMILIES WERE HAPPY ABOUT IT ON TOP OF IT ALL, those two people got MARRIED and had BABIES when you weren't looking?

i do have to add in that she definitely did not mention my parents' whole glaring social class problem, however I would have to imagine she'd have been wondering about that. because if you knew both families, there's just no getting around it. ESPECIALLY if she knew them back in the Fucking Day.

and, funnily, my parents found it just as shocking, somehow, merely that she worked at the school that their child attended and they vaguely knew who she was. my parents were losing their minds like That was crazy.

like the fact that I exist and said a couple sentences to her could have been like meeting the eraserhead baby for her, I'll never know exactly. but my mom and dad were like SHE TEACHES AT YOUR SCHOOL ?!?;!?;

after this happened, I know I told my mom that I finally met her and told her all that, but I don't really remember that conversation at all. again, idk if I had actually talked to my dad about it before, or if I didn't tell him about it until after I had met her. if I did tell him before idk if I told him I met her after. maybe I did. so much of life is blurry to me.

but I do remember this as a unique opportunity that I jumped on when I got the chance

#it really is a small world and life is so strange #sometimes it's wonderful that #it can be super fun

0 notes