Marriage - Part 1 - So What Happened?

My greatest inspirations for hubs are the HubPages themselves.

I recently responded to a forum question about the best age to marry and it got me thinking about the subject of marriage in general. I’ve actually spent most of my life thinking about marriage… getting married, being married, trying to stay married, getting divorced, getting remarried… it’s just a vicious cycle.

I've been married five times. Ironically, as I was growing up, I never even wanted to get married... not even once, never mind five times. I grew up in a single parent household with no real father figure or male role model to speak of. So, I never had the feeling that I needed a male in my life to somehow complete me.

My dad was a series of stories my mother related to me dating back to a time I was too young to remember. He was a picture of a man that looked like Danny Kay in a frame on my mother’s dresser and a couple of old suits hanging in the back of the closet, with the trace scent of aftershave still clinging to them. He was a few personal belongings tucked away in a dresser drawer and a pair of monogrammed cufflinks with a matching tie clip my mother kept in her small jewelry box. He was a wedding ring she wore on a gold chain around her neck until the day she died.

He was many things, but he was not and would never be a living, breathing, loving father who would go to work every day to provide for us, or who would cherish and protect us from harm and the evils of the world outside.

As the years went by, my father was elevated to sainthood status. To my mother, a young widow with some emotional problems, no mortal man would ever be able to compete with him. There were no other men in her life after him, ever. As far back as I can remember she was always alone. No men came to the house to visit. There were no boyfriends or suitors making promises or marriage proposals. Never even once do I remember her going out on single date.

There was no Robert Young “Father Knows Best” dad to make everything alright again when things went wrong. There was no happy June and Ward Cleaver union in my reality for me to emulate. That existed only on TV. That was, for me, only a fantasy.

Unlike many of the little princesses from my era, I never thought about Prince Charming riding up on his white charger to carry me off to live happily ever after in a castle. I was just not a princess type of girl. I wasn’t ugly, but I was not pretty in any traditional or conventional way. I was no well behaved miniature Sandra Dee. I was always in trouble and unable to sit still for more than ten seconds. Small for my age and painfully thin with glasses and flaming red hair, it was pretty obvious no prince was ever going to come for me.

But I didn’t care about handsome princes or lofty castles. I wanted to be a photographer. For those of you old enough to remember them, we had a Kodak Brownie 127 camera that had become my best friend and I never went anywhere without. As much as I hated posing for pictures, I loved taking them. I wanted to be another Margaret Bourke-White who was famous for her work documenting the Great Depression, and who was the only woman photographer permitted in war zones by the U.S. Army during the Second World War. I wanted to travel all around the world photographing exciting places and interesting people and telling their stories.

So what happened?

Why am I not a famous photojournalist documenting the day to day lives of our troops in Afghanistan for my next book on the New York Times bestseller list?

How did I end up living in an old “haunted” farmhouse in New England with two miracle daughters the doctors told me I would never be able to have, a beautiful little grandson, two yorkie dogs, and husband number five?

To answer those questions, I suppose I have to go back to the death of my mother. After she passed away of congestive heart failure, I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. The family of my father’s brother, they had three kids and my mother never liked them very much. Apparently they didn’t like her very much either. We did not socialize and I had only seen them a few times in my life. I hardly knew these people and I certainly didn’t want to live with them. My hyper-activity coupled with my inability to accept the passing of my mother made me a completely disruptive force within the household and more trouble than the family could handle. I had no skills to help me cope with my grief so naturally I acted out in the worst possible ways. I was pronounced incorrigible and turned over to the tender mercies of the state. The next few years did nothing to improve my life or may attitude.

God bless the foster parents of this world, those people loving and generous enough to open their homes and their hearts to unwanted children, because surely they often have a difficult and thankless job.

I did not thrive in this environment, which finally brings me to how I met husband number one, the whole point of this hub in the first place. It was supposed to be about marriage. But I haven’t even talked about marriage or a single one of my husbands yet. If you’ve read any of my other hubs, you know by now that it’s the attention-deficit thing that gets in my way and sidetracks me when I’m writing. My mind just picks up a thread and follows it. So writing about marriage becomes writing about fathers which morphs into writing about my mother which then turns to why I’m not living my dream, and blah, blah, blah, pretty soon I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore. So let me see if I can get back on track here.

I met husband number one while I was trying to survive living on the miserably cold, damp streets of San Francisco. I had run away from my foster care situation and made my way west. I’d like to say that I hitch-hiked and thumbed my way across the country with a bounty of adventures to recount, but it was nothing that glamorous. I packed some clothes and personal items in my backpack (the green army rucksack type everybody had back in the early 70’s), bought a bus ticket, boarded a Grey Hound bus, and three days later got off in Oakland, CA. I have no idea if anybody ever reported me missing or even looked for me. I was a few weeks shy of my 17^th birthday and the only thing that I cared about was that I was free at last. At least in theory anyway.

I made my way to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, because of some misguided delusion that it would be a cool place to go where the people would welcome me with peace, love, open arms, and chants of Hari Krishna. Yeah right, what was I thinking? I had more street smarts than that, but what the heck, it was worth a shot. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out that the Haight was not a cool place to hang out. Not, that everyone there was bad, but the Summer of Love was long past. It was seedy and rundown. The streets were full of drugged up kids and the people who preyed on them. I might have just gotten off the bus, but it was not the Smalltown, USA bus where you trusted all your neighbors and didn’t lock your doors at night. It was the New York City bus and I knew better than to accept any offers from the unsavory types that were promising free love, free drugs, and a place to crash for the night. I had travelled some 3,000 miles only to find myself in San Francisco’s tacky version of New York’s East Village and the Bowery.

So now what?

I had no idea. I began to explore the city. I had to figure out a course of action. I couldn’t just wander about the streets all night, or maybe I could. Golden Gate Park looked like a nice place in which to hang out while I contemplated what I was going to do next. It didn’t take a degree from Harvard to realize that if I went back to the Haight I would probably end up in the clutches of some drug dealing pimp who would hook me on Heroin and turn me out for tricks. We heard about those things all the time back home. Pimps and dealers who were picking up young runaways right off the bus at the Port Authority and forcing them into the sex trade. I was determined that was not going to be my fate.

Several months of living on the streets, pan-handling for spare change, sleeping on park benches and in doorways, and freezing in the bone chilling fog that rolled in off the bay had begun to take their toll on me. It was fall and the rainy season was just getting started. The tourists I lived off of during the summer months were getting few and far between. Spare change was sparce. I was constantly cold and hungry. Although I was losing weight and getting sick, I was not ready to pick through the city's trash cans, not yet anyway. What I needed was a warm, dry place to live, but nobody rents apartments to unemployed 17 year olds. I even considered the Mitchell Brothers Ultra Room on O'Farrell Street, but I was so skinny and had no real figure to speak of. Even though I promised myself I'd never sink down to that level, I was getting desperate.

I was caught in the horrible catch 22 of the teenage runaway. Fortunately for me, I had a friend. A young man, named John, I met in the park while pan-handling. He was very much a believer in astrology and because of our birthdates and certain aspects in the charts he had created for us he believed that our lives were destined to be intertwined. I don’t know that I believed any of it, but none the less, we became fast friends. His mother would not accept that he was gay, so several times he brought me home for supper pretending I was a girlfriend. He gave me money, bought me food and warm clothes, and let me stay over at his mother’s house whenever he could sneak me up into his room or when she was out for the night. I appreciated everything he ever did for me, but it didn’t solve my problem of not having a job or a place to live. It was pure desperation that lead me to my first marriage.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Marriage-Part-2-Saved-By-The-Wedding-Bells

http://hubpages.com/hub/Marriage-Part-3-Tick-Tack-Toe-Three-In-A-Row

http://hubpages.com/hub/Marriage-Part-4-Stooge-Number-Two-Larry