An Unchanging Foundation and the Landscape it Sits On

Twenty-two years ago, in a sophomore English class, two very different people met. One was a fifteen-year-old girl with the largest smile, the loudest laugh, and the most beautiful green eyes. The other was a young athletic boy on the swim team with a quirky grin, an infectious chuckle, and one half-brown, half-blue eye. Twenty-one years ago they shared their first date at a Sadie Hawkins Dance, and, on November 28, 2012, they will have been married twenty years. Katie Hatter and Michael Hatter were, and remain, two people with seemingly little in common. Yet despite their varied quirks, personalities, and pasts, my parents remain the unaltered foundation of a steadfast family.

In fact my parents have many mannerisms that make each of them uniquely distinguishable and distinct. My mom is an avid reader, with neat stacks of over three hundred romance novels. My dad reads as much as she does, but his lopsided stacks of maybe fifty fantasy-action books have been rearranged time and time again from constant rereading. My mom spends every Sunday with her beloved Nascar races, and can’t stay focused unless Judge Judy plays in the background while she works. My dad has no use for the television, and only watches shows to spend time with his TV-addicted family. He plays music to stay focused, but generally ends up making fun of the song with as much gusto as my mom cheering on Jeff Gordon. He reads to his children or plays video games with them, while she spend hours playing Rummy and Shanghai with them.

Even their personalities are extreme opposites. My mom blows up easily. She’s a perfectionist, and easily stressed. Her strong opinions and fiery attitude have gotten the better of her on more than one occasion, and, if she could, she would make everything go exactly as she planned. But she’s unfailingly kind. Every day she tells my sisters and me how proud of us she is, she comes to all of our events, and she showers us with encouragement in our darkest hours. When my dad finally shows anger, he explodes even when he didn’t appear to have been angry in the first place. He will pick up and take us on a four-hour drive along the delta just because my sister was tired of sitting in the living room. And he’s as proud of us as my mom, but his compliments are more along the lines of a smile, or a laugh, and on rare occasions a “She did great”.

But the biggest difference in my parent’s lives is their past. My mother grew up in a stable family that still influences her today, whereas my grandfather on my dad’s side had brain damage from a tumor so my dad didn’t really have a dad growing up and we never got to meet him. My mom got in trouble when she was younger for driving the truck around my great-grandparent’s ranch without adult supervision. At the age of nine, my dad was the “adult supervision” for my cousins. One day a week my mom had to clean her entire house before she could do anything else and, as a result, she never wanted to force that on her kids, but while my dad agrees, he can’t stand living in a messy house.

So how can two people so drastically different still dance around and kiss in the kitchen like two teenagers? Simply put, the differences that make the landscape of their unwavering foundation so treacherous share that landscape with an amazing set of similarities. Both my mom and my dad are generous to a fault. They both depended on their best friend in high school and they both keep in touch with that best friend. Neither of them can sing well, neither of them is decent at math, nor can either of them ever say “No”. They both have three beautiful, intelligent, and strong-willed daughters. They are both strong conservatives, and they have been together through a failed business, two bankruptcies, a foreclosure, and my dad’s deployment to Afghanistan. The truth is that my parents form an unchanging foundation for my family, built upon a rocky but strong landscape. Those different quirks, personalities, and pasts that make up those rocks are smoothed and strengthened by the similar traits and values shared by the two supports that make up the most resilient home I have ever known.