Dave

*Originally posted on my Wordpress blog 05.05.2020 

I was just a kid. I had no idea who I was. I had grown up in a regimented, highly disciplined, and very Catholic family. All I knew was that there were a lot of rules in life and I had better keep track of them all. I was pretty sure I was going to screw up my life. I mean, wow, all those rules. I had just broken free of twelve years of serious Catholic education and was attending the local state college and working lots of hours at the library. I had no idea how smart, how creative, how attractive I was. In fact, I pretty much thought I was a loser. There was no evidence for this. I’d worked hard in high school and earned solid A’s in academically rigorous classes. I had friends and was well liked by my peers and my bosses at work. As the oldest and almost only daughter in a big Catholic family, I knew how to cook, clean and take care of babies and kids. Where was the loser in all of that?

I don’t know where the loser was the day I met Dave. That was on Nov. 29th. We had randomly selected the same shady area to eat our bag lunches and he struck up a conversation with me. By the middle of January, we were an item and on January 21st of the following year, we were married.

Yes, that’s correct. This barely 19 year old girl agreed to get married. How did that happen? Dave and I had pretty quickly developed a close although, from what I know now, fairly immature relationship. We latched onto each other, he a 23 year old mechanical engineering student and me, a kid, majoring mostly in experiences. We spent the months from that January to the following November going to school, working , and seeing each other as often as we could get away with it. I would say that I was excited about this first “real” boyfriend but I think I was as much excited about the idea of having a real boyfriend as I was about the boyfriend himself. I liked Dave but I think I was flattered that this older, handsome, confident guy wanted to hang out with me. I would do pretty much anything to hold onto the this taste of grownup life. But I wasn’t thinking about marriage. Marriage was for real adults and I was just a kid.

My bother Mark was in the military and would be coming home on leave in January to marry his sweetheart. The plans for his wedding had been underway for months and family members were making arrangements to be there on Saturday January 20. In anticipation of this, there was a lot of talk at Thanksgiving about the wedding plans. Dave and I sometimes spent time with my brother Noel and his girlfriend and that weekend we were hanging out just talking about a nebulous future. We all liked the idea of someday buying some land and establishing a shared community. Other family members were interested too but, for now, it was the four of us batting this idea around. I remember that Noel suddenly announced an idea: why don’t we get started on this now? Mark was getting married in January and the other brothers were going to be home for the wedding so why don’t we just get married that same weekend? We could get a house and share expenses for the remainder of the school year (all of us were students/workers) and then we could talk about the plans to buy land. Why not?

I will spare you the whole story but all you need to know is that, once the idea was floated, it took off. I think now that I was shocked then. My reaction was something like: “Wha? huh? I mean, what? Well, I guess… I mean… yeah, I mean maybe… maybe we’re getting married. I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess we’re getting married…”.

Remember that part above about doing anything to hold onto someone who found me attractive? Sadly, I clearly remember thinking, well, yes, I guess I should marry him. I mean, after all, no one else is going to want to marry me. I better not give up this chance. This will probably be my only chance at getting married. WHAT???? It’s so sad to think that I believed all options ended right there. It’s sad to think now that, at the tender age of 19, I had decided that a) marriage was the only acceptable option and b) that I had to take advantage of this opportunity because it was the only one of its kind that I was going to get in life. It is also sad to me now that my parents were caught in a parental conflict. On the one hand , they wanted me to be my own person, to make my own decisions, to live my own life. They didn’t want to suggest that this wedding was perhaps not the best idea but I think that, at least my mother thought it was not a good idea. But they never said anything. No one talked to me about doubts or qualms. And the aching and awful truth is that I remember waiting. I was waiting for someone to say something, for one of my parents (more likely my mother) to actually question me about this. I was waiting, painfully and sadly waiting, during those weeks for one person to say to me, “Hey, this isn’t a good idea”. I just needed one person to stand up and say to me, “Are you sure about this?” I knew in my mind that it wasn’t a good idea but I didn’t have the courage to stop the train that was now moving down the track.

During the first week of January, I asked my older brother Brian to go on an excursion with me. I wanted to talk to him. It took a lot of courage for me to broach the subject but I did. I told him that I was not confident about this whole plan. I wasn’t certain that I wanted to get married. It felt scary and I was unsure but the date was less than three weeks away. What was I supposed to do? Poor Brian. He reassured me with all the wisdom of an unmarried 25 year old man that this was normal, that everyone had cold feet when it came to marriage. He tried to put me at ease by reminding me that Dave was a good guy and the family was there for me. I took him at his word and worked hard to extinguish the notion that I could stop this train.

I woke on the morning of the 21st to a light but steady rain. I clearly remember standing in my tiny bedroom in my parents’ house and watching the rain hit the windows, not sure if I was seeing my own tears or the raindrops. WTF. What I know now is that I did that morning what I have gotten pretty good at doing. I put one foot in front of the other and walked through the day, mask in place, hiding any doubt or fear. And that’s how the marriage started.

Frankly, it didn’t get much better. We did spend the next eight or ten months living with my brother Noel and his wife and that was a good enough situation. But it takes a lot of energy to hold a happy, cheerful mask up over a “what have I done” face and the cracks were obvious to both Dave and me. We borrowed Noel’s VW hippy van and took a honeymoon over spring break in March but obviously I was unhappy. Clearly this was not a rom-com marriage. One honeymoon afternoon when I was unwilling to be intimate in the hills of Northern California, Dave got so mad at me that he stomped down to the van and drove off leaving me to figure out how to get somewhere. And so it went.

Dave graduated, took a job with a major tech firm in Silicon Valley, and we moved five hundred miles away from our families. He was now an engineer, going to the world of work every day and I was now a 20 year old college kid. I had enrolled in a large, diverse, public university and I was thrilled to be on a campus with 29,000 students and none of them knew me or my family. I was excited about writing papers. I loved reading everything and I delighted in taking classes that were not in my major. I was curious about everything and everyone. One of my first real friends entered my life at that time and she often commented on my “shiny eyes”. I think they were shiny because I was somehow starting to feel the tension from all those rules begin to loosen.

At the same time, Dave was excited about his new position at a highly regarded tech firm. He enjoyed the ambiance there and his coworkers became his friends and their wives became my friends. He was living a grown up life. He wanted babies and a good wife. I was living a college life. I was no where near ready for babies. In fact, the small voice inside that had once suggested to me that I didn’t really want this marriage was now becoming a much bigger, much stronger voice. To my credit, I did not give up easily on the marriage. I knew Dave was mad at me and getting madder every day. I didn’t blame him. I was more interested in my classes and my college friends than I was in him. I yelled at myself to change my attitude. I told myself , “You need to fix this. You need to make this work. This is your one chance at marriage (divorce was out of the question in my family). You picked him. Now make it work.” I became angry at myself. I stopped eating and began smoking way too much weed. Dave got increasingly and justifiably angry with me too. On several occasions he lost control of his anger and it hurt. Within a short time, suicide seemed like the only option.

One of my classes happened to be in the newly minted Women’s Studies Program. Through this class I became acquainted with the newly established Women’s Center on campus. I remember the afternoon I walked in there and told the friendly woman at the counter that I was in trouble. She immediately arranged for me to see a counselor who then immediately helped Dave and me get couples’ counseling on campus. I thought that for sure I could now become the good wife I was supposed to be. But the couples counseling only made our discrepancies more obvious and unsettling. In fact, the skilled and very experienced therapist flat out said he didn’t understand why we were married. I left his office with the sinking feeling that my life had gone way off course. A couple of weeks later, Dave’s fist hit me hard and, with the second blow he aimed at me, he inadvertently punched a hole in the wall behind me instead. I left the next day and found temporary housing via the Women’s Center.

Over the next ten years I discovered a lot of the world on my own. I drifted for awhile, living out of my 1965 VW bug and flopping on couches and in beds wherever I could. I lived close to the Golden Gate Bridge and the allure of suicide lingered in the back of my mind. I had really messed things up. Then the car was stolen from in front of my brother’s house. Pretty much I had reached the lowest point in my life. But I have to give that girl a lot of credit for her determination and resourcefulness.

I continued to depend on the services available to me via the Women’s Center and they helped me secure a place to rent. I found a studio apartment near campus, a job in the campus bookstore and a second job waitressing. I bought a used ten speed bicycle for my transportation and dug deeply into my classes. For close to a year, I kept my life secret from my parents. I couldn’t bare to tell them the truth so I would simply act as if everything was fine. Three of my brothers now lived in the same city as I did and they were supportive of me but left my life and my secrets to my own discretion. Eventually, I went to visit the parents and had the painful conversation, first with my dad and then, later that day, with my mom. To my surprise, they were not angry. I think they were sad for me but accepting of the situation. I wish I could have had the kind of relationship with them that would have allowed me to be honest and upfront with them but my perception of their expectations and my own anger at myself got in the way of that.

Once I got my bearings in my new world, I thrived. I worked with a therapist and that work brought me understanding and self acceptance. I developed a close network of friends and earned my degree and a teaching credential. I traveled on a shoestring budget in Asia, Europe, South America, and various road trips in the US and Canada. I had boyfriends and more boyfriends, some more serious than others. I lived alone and I lived with roommates. Eventually I went to grad school because I liked going to school. I earned that degree and another credential and loved being employed in the world of education. I learned that marriage was not a requirement in the school of life but, in time, I did find someone who mattered enough to me that I wanted to marry him and so I did. There were only loud approving voices in my head for that marriage.

Probably the best lesson I got from that whole first marriage (and there were a lot of lessons I learned) was to never ever again ignore the voice I hear within. At the time that I got married, my voice was so small. My voice was small because kids were required to have a small voice in our house (“hold your tongue” was a common parental command) and because females at that time were required to have a small voice. But through that marriage I learned that I no longer lived with my parents and my voice could be as loud as it needed to be. I was also lucky because I came of age just as the second wave of feminism was gaining ground. Because I was in the generation following my mother, my voice could be so much louder.

So many years later, I am oddly grateful for that relationship with Dave and for all I learned as a result. Because of those early lessons, I was able to come into a life that had meaning and value. Shortly after my parens accepted that I was getting divorced, they asked me about getting an annulment from the Catholic Church. I didn’t care one bit about the Catholic Church at that point but I cared about my parents so I went through the process to secure a church annulment. Part of that process involved contacting Dave and asking for a statement from him. Dave was not happy about this. He felt strongly that there had been a marriage and he was not willing to participate in an annulment process. But he also knew that it must matter to me so he gave me his compromise. He would cooperate with the annulment if I would promise never to contact him again. I was unwilling to make that agreement and took his message back to the church authorities. They said it didn’t matter that much and, in fact, it made my case for an annulment even stronger. So I paid my $500 and made my parents happy. But I also decided not to reach out anymore to Dave because, if he felt that strongly about not seeing me again, then I wanted to give him what he wanted.

I did give Dave that courtesy but I have never stopped wondering about him. I am still curious. How did his life turn out? I know that he left the tech company and moved over to the Mammoth Lakes part of Central California. I had heard that he was working with the park service over there in winter and over on the coast in Santa Cruz in summer. I still remember his parents’ names and their address. Of course I know Dave’s full name and birthdate. I have tried several times over the years to track him down via Google search but to no avail. He has managed to keep a low online profile which doesn’t surprise me. Even back in our early days, he was tuned into the natural world far more than into the tech world.

For now, I can say that I hope he found a partner or a series of partners in his life. I know that as a young man, he wanted to be a father. I hope that he got that chance, if he still wanted it. I imagine that he left the tech world far behind and lived a creative life, spending a good amount of time outside. I’d like to know what he remembers about our time together. I’d like to know if he took any lessons away from those years. I’d like to talk to him, to see how the years have treated him.

I worry that he is still angry with me. I worry that he thinks badly of me. If there is something I would like to do before I die, it is to clear up that chapter of my life. But it’s scary because what if he has carried anger and bitterness towards me all these years? Then what? I have a bit of an online presence and most of my siblings do too. If he wanted to, he could have found me but he hasn’t yet. Maybe that’s why I am letting this story rest for now.

I know this story is also the perfect example of how life teaches us so much. Had I not had lunch in the shade on that November day, my life would have been something entirely different. Had I not married Dave in the first place, perhaps all the other rich experiences of my life would not have happened. It’s funny how life works. I don’t get it but I am always puzzling over its mystery and wonder. Things seem to have a way of working out, you know? Maybe this is as far as I am going to go with this chapter. Maybe I just have to be okay with that.
** Thank you to Harold for encouraging me to write the story of that first marriage. He’d seen the reference to Dave in the previous blog post and his kind and gentle curiosity sparked the desire in me to go back and review the whole story.

***Thank you to Bruce who sees me through my writing. I appreciate your acceptance, your curiosity, and your boundless encouragement.