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Age Twenty-five: The Turning Point

/ Gerry Wilson / 30 Comments

So we come to the end of the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge. Thanks to Jane Ann McLachlan for proposing this challenge that has taken me places in memory where I would never have gone otherwise. At times I believed I’d have nothing to write, but it seems memory begets memory.

The end of the challenge brings me to a strange place in my personal history. If you’ve been following these posts, you know that by the time I turned twenty-five, I had two little boys. I was a stay-at-home mom. I couldn’t imagine a different kind of life. I was happy. I thought we were happy.

Christmas

Our first Christmas in the little gray house, my husband and I decided to have a party. I cooked all the food, I cleaned, and I decorated, using lots of freshly cut evergreens and magnolia my parents brought the day before. They took both babies home with them, so we would have our party and the rest of the weekend to ourselves. It was a rare occasion. My husband was in his internship year by then, which meant more nights on call, more time away from home.

We had a great crowd, mostly medical school friends, good food, good wine. I wore a new dress, and I remember feeling pretty. After the last guests left, we stayed up late, picking up glasses, cleaning up spills, putting away food. I was excited and pleased at how well the party had gone, and I kept trying to get some kind of response out of him. I wanted to be told what a good job I’d done. I had done it for him, after all. But I got nothing. He had seemed withdrawn and sad for weeks. Every time I’d asked, he would say he was exhausted, which was true. His schedule was grueling. But I kept after him that night until he told me. Yes, there was something wrong. He wasn’t sure he loved me, he said. Maybe he loved somebody else. What? We had been married three years. We had two children.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next morning, he got up early and went hunting with friends–another surprise. He hadn’t told me he was going. I was left alone, distraught and uncertain. I missed my children. I called my parents, thinking I would just check on the kids, and my mother immediately knew something was wrong. I told her. I’ve always regretted that.

By the time my husband came home the following afternoon, the little boys were back, too. He had made his decision, he said. He wanted us. Just like that. That easily. And I believed him.

We would stay together for a long time after that Christmas. I gave birth to two more sons. Did I think that having more children would hold him? No. I’d wanted a house full of children, remember? It didn’t matter. He left anyway.

I blamed myself. He was the one who left, but it must have been my fault. All my fairy-tale notions of love and marriage? Destroyed. I hated myself for not knowing what I might have done differently. Oh, I knew all the self-talk and the psychology. I was a psych major, after all. I went for counseling. But still, it was a long time before I could look anybody in the eye and carry on a conversation.

I wasn’t writing back then, but I was getting ready. I believe the surprises, the unexpected turns, the complexities of relationships, the betrayals, the losses, the long years of trying to hold a marriage together, of getting up in the morning and putting on a fictional face to the world (“How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you!”), were the catalysts for stories to come.

I hope stories will surface out of this challenge. We shall see.

Thanks to all of you who have read and followed these little pieces of my past. I hope you’ll come back soon and see what else I have in store. Or in story.

If you participated in the challenge, what did you gain from it? If you were a reader and/or follower, what have these memories sparked for you?

Twenty-Four and Two Babies

/ Gerry Wilson / 12 Comments

Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Maybe something like that. But I’m thrilled about a second baby, never mind that it’s so soon. I wanted more than one, remember? And the first one is adorable–a handful, a little firecracker, and so smart. I try to toilet-train him before the new baby comes. He walked at nine months and talked at a year. Surely, he can be potty trained, so I won’t have two in diapers.

We move to a small rental house so we’ll have more room, but we don’t stay there very long. We find a house that costs about what an inexpensive car costs these days, and we move again. This house has more space and a huge backyard with a playhouse. Convenient to the hospital. Perfect for a growing family.

I am three months away from my twenty-fifth birthday when the second baby comes. Older baby is twenty months old. The potty training works–until #2 comes. So we have diapers for two, after all. These were cloth diapers, my friends.

The grandmothers have learned their lesson. This time, they hire a nurse to live in for a couple of weeks. This is the cultural norm in the Mississippi Delta. I’m a hill-country girl. I never heard of such. I dont like having somebody else underfoot in my house. My husband, who is now in his last year of medical school, hardly breaks his stride. When I start running a high fever, I drive myself to the doctor. The new baby is a week old. (New moms didn’t drive for three weeks back then.) It turns out that I am seriously ill, and once again, the grandmothers step in. My mother takes the older boy home with her, and my mother-in-law, God bless her, comes to stay with us until I’m better.

Once I’m well, I’m on my own with two babies much of the time, but I don’t mind. This is what I was meant for, remember? I am astonished by these two little boys we have made. I am tired and sleepless, but full of wonder.

Everything seems just about perfect. A house, an ambitious, smart husband, two beautiful children. But things aren’t always what they seem. I won’t tell you that story yet. That’s for the twenty-fifth post, the last of these memoirs, and a good launching point into what would become my future.

First–a look at the little boys:

My parents with the two babies
Baby # 2. Yes, that’s an apron he’s wearing. Ever heard of those?
Brothers

 

Proud grandparents. Happy mother. Happy, healthy little boys.

It’s a good thing, isn’t it, that we can’t always see what’s coming. 

Twenty-Two: Death and Life

/ Gerry Wilson / 17 Comments

Three things marked this year of my life. Right around the time of my twenty-second birthday in September, my father-in-law died of a head injury sustained in the auto accident I described earlier.

In November, John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I remember where I was when I heard the news (as most of us who remember that day at all must surely do). I was working in the engineering office at Bellsouth when someone came in and told us. I was devastated, stunned. John Kennedy and his beautiful wife represented a new era. Camelot and all that. And then, he was gone.

I remember staying glued to the television for days. I cried as though I’d lost a close friend. What was it about a young man as President that so captured our imaginations?

A few months later, my husband and I had big news of our own. I remember when we told my parents I was pregnant. They had come to visit us, and we had just found out. I’d gotten highlights in my hair for the first time, and my mother kept talking about how pretty I looked. I remember what I was wearing when we went out to dinner with them that night–a slim, white wool skirt and a matching white sweater. I did feel pretty, a little magical, and in awe of what was happening to me.

We were nervous about telling them, though. We’d only been married eight months, and I had my job, and two more years of medical school loomed. But when we told them, my mother said, “I knew it!” She said I had that “glow.”

Here I am in a photo just days before the baby came. I wasn’t very big at all.

Baby shower

Yes, it’s a baby shower. A gloriously happy time, right, in spite of that awful plaid dress. But notice the triangle of people in the picture. I’m opening baby gifts. The young man in the coat and tie is my husband. Does he look simply detached, or ready to bolt?  And that’s my mother, looking a little askance. I don’t believe she was quite ready to be a grandmother, but oh, she did love my babies.

That child made his entrance into the world two days after my twenty-third birthday. You’ll meet him in the next post.

Are we ever grown up enough to be parents? Or do we grow along with our children?