And it came to pass that they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke over them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind.
Ether 6:6
The Foolish Sailor
In a small boat I drifted from shore Onto a storm-tossed sea No rudder No oars No sail No instruments To read the skies Or plumb the depths I even left behind The Master Who could have calmed The wind And the waves And steered me Safely home I didn’t know He followed me Walking on the water Waiting for me to turn And reach for Him
I have a confession: I don’t want to write about my first marriage. I’ve spent forty-five years trying not to think about it, while at the same time trying to forgive “John” for everything he did, and trying to forgive myself for the messy way I ended it. So, no, I don’t want to write about it. But my story wouldn’t be complete without those nine tumultuous years, so here goes.
During the first semester of my junior year at BYU, John and I wrote more often. He was now a lieutenant in the army, completing his training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His letters were full of idealism and his plan to become a lawyer after he got out of the army so he could help the downtrodden. He decried the racism that infected his hometown and urged me to find a recent issue of a popular magazine whose cover featured two babies of different races sitting side by side. That was his ideal world. He wrote that he wanted to join the Peace Corps when he finished law school.
I began to fall in love with the idealistic young man who wrote those letters, and his feelings for me grew as well. On leave over the Christmas break, he drove out to California to see me. Then he drove me back to Provo, with an overnight stop at his sister’s apartment in Los Angeles, where she introduced me to her boyfriend as “Johnny’s little girlfriend.” We slow-danced to her Johnny Mathis albums while she was at work. I was swept away by the romance of it all.
John and I became intimate during that week and expressed our tentative feelings for each other, agreeing that if we both felt the same way when he got back from Vietnam, we’d get married. But John said we should still see other people, so it was all rather vague. I told him about Mike. He was surprised I wasn’t a virgin, but it didn’t seem to bother him very much.
Back at BYU, taking John at his word — and maybe a little resentful that he didn’t love me enough to commit — I continued seeing Mike. One night John called while I was out on a date, and that was that. He couldn’t stand the thought that I was out with another man. He called and asked me to marry him before he left for Vietnam, and I said yes. A few days later a pawn-shop engagement ring arrived in the mail. The diamond was tiny, but I didn’t care. I placed it on my own finger, no candle ceremony required.
John was leaving for Vietnam in May, so we set our wedding date for February 3, 1968, and I packed my things and went home. I was to fly out to North Carolina with a stop in Shreveport to meet John’s parents before the wedding.
I was twenty and John was twenty-one when we recited our vows in the base chapel. The stained-glass window above the chapel entrance featured paratroopers jumping out of war planes. There were six people in attendance, all virtual strangers to me. John’s mother had planned every detail of the ceremony without consulting me. I didn’t care. I was marrying the man I loved. My life was finally moving forward and I thought I knew where it was going.
After the ceremony, when we walked into the room where a simple reception was to be held, two young soldiers were mopping the floor. The punch bowl had shattered, spilling bright pink punch all over the white tablecloth and across the floor. We laughed and ate the cake John’s mother had ordered. When the reception ended and John and I ran through a shower of rice to his old Volkswagen Beetle, I saw that the lace overskirt on my $10 thrift-shop wedding dress had disintegrated into shreds. At the time, in the first flush of our fairy-tale romance, I laughed off all the “omens of doom.” But as the years passed those images of war and brokenness took on the significance of prophecy.
There wasn’t enough officers’ housing at Fort Bragg, so we were assigned a ten-by-sixty mobile home off-base. I didn’t care about our humble accommodations. I was deeply in love with the idealistic young man who had written me those wonderful letters and he was deeply in love with the sweet young woman who had written back. We hadn’t spent enough time with each other to see beneath those carefully composed words.
We didn’t have much money and there wasn’t a lot to do in Fayetteville, where the base was located, but John was fun to be with. He was always clowning around, making me laugh. On Saturday mornings we watched “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons on a tiny TV in the bedroom of our cramped trailer. Like any newlyweds, we were crazy about each other, so everything we did together, even going out for hamburgers, was a delight. We tried to make the most of the three months we had together before he went off to war.
One day during those three months, John showed me a letter from his mother. In it, she said he “must insist” that I finish college. When I read those words, my rebellious streak sparked to life. I wasn’t about to let anybody boss me around, not even my new husband, and certainly not my new mother-in-law. I wouldn’t go back to college until I was good and ready, and maybe not at all.
But I did need to earn money, so I decided to attend secretarial school while John was overseas. The plan was for me to stay with my in-laws in Shreveport until he returned. After he left and I settled in with them, I enrolled in the venerable Miss Ayers School for Young Ladies, which had recently admitted the first two African-American students in its history.
Living in the South four years after the Civil Rights Act had become law, I felt as if I’d stepped into the Jim Crow past. Reminders of segregation were everywhere. The one time I rode a bus in Shreveport I was shocked to see all the people with brown skin sitting in the back, just as if those onerous laws hadn’t been struck down. Indignant, I marched past all the white faces and sat in the back, too. Everyone stared at me but I stayed put, feeling a tiny bit like Rosa Parks striking a blow for integration.
I got my first driver’s license in Louisiana. Getting behind the wheel and driving wherever I wanted to go made me feel in control of my own life for the first time, and I loved it. Looking back through the years, I think that exhilarating sense of freedom behind the wheel was the beginning of the end of my marriage to John. While he was away, the fear that I’d married too young began to bubble up beneath the surface. It would be many more years before I could admit that feeling into my consciousness, but it became an undercurrent slowly rising from the depths as my marriage grew ever more turbulent.
Back then I still loved John, and I missed him terribly. He was supposed to be gone for two years. I didn’t know how I was going to stand it. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Just before Christmas, eight months after he’d left, John came home in a cast that stretched from the toes of his right foot to halfway up his chest. He’d been driving his own jeep, against regulations, when he crashed head-on into a dump truck on a mountain road, shattering his right femur and knocking out four front teeth. It happened on my twenty-first birthday. I got the call three days later from the army hospital in Okinawa, Japan. John would be in the hospital for six weeks and then he could come home.
That was the abrupt end of my first husband’s army career as a psychological operations officer, which consisted of writing leaflets meant to win the hearts and minds of the Vietcong and scattering them over the countryside from a helicopter like so much wartime litter.
It was wonderful to have John home for Christmas, but a tiny part of me missed my newfound freedom. We were both hoping for an early discharge, but the U.S. Army wasn’t ready to let him go. When John told me we were to be stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana for the next nine months, I lost it. All my pent-up fear and frustration, all my anger over being at the mercy of the U.S. Army, burst out of me in a fit of hysteria. I screamed and cried in the car until I exhausted myself. John was disgusted with me for losing control of my emotions, but my outburst let off enough steam to get me through the next several months of servitude in relative calm.
A few weeks after we got to Fort Polk, I found a job as a medical transcriptionist at the base hospital. Having a full-time job allowed me to avoid the officers’ wives’ functions I dreaded. Defying hidebound convention, I made friends with the wife of an enlisted man. The couple lived in the trailer next to ours in a mobile home park set in the middle of the sandy pine barrens in Leesville, Louisiana. After we got to know each other, my friend told me the other officers’ wives were sniping at me behind my back because I was associating with her. Ever the rebel, I enjoyed metaphorically thumbing my nose at their snobbery.
Leesville was known to the soldiers stationed at Fort Polk by a nasty nickname I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say that it was one of the least desirable postings in the army. Summers in the middle of Louisiana were oven-hot, swamp-humid, and thoroughly miserable, and those single-wide mobile homes had no air conditioning. I watched the moon landing by myself in the damp breeze of a giant, noisy floor fan, sweating profusely as Neal Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind.
A few weeks before John was due to be discharged, my sister Rita was getting married back home. I seized on that as an excuse to escape Louisiana: I’d drive home and help Mom with the wedding. She’d recently divorced my stepfather after ten years of marriage and had my youngest siblings, April and Alan, to care for, so I told myself she must be desperate for my support.
John and I had bought a second car, a baby-blue Karman-Ghia, and I drove it out to San Diego by myself, enjoying every minute of freedom on the road. I was enjoying myself so much that I got a speeding ticket a few miles before arriving at my destination. When John was released, he joined me at Mom’s house, working odd jobs until school started. Then we rented a tiny cinder-block shack for $60 a month and he enrolled at San Diego State to finish his undergraduate studies while I worked in a doctor’s office to help Uncle Sam put him through school.
John spent all his time attending classes and studying. After he started law school, he virtually lived at the law library. When exams approached, he often spent the night there. I came home from work to an empty house, ate and slept alone, and left for work the next morning, all without seeing my husband. I had enjoyed my taste of freedom while he was away, but now that he was back, I wanted his company at least a little bit of the time, not this quiet, empty house. One Thanksgiving during those years, when my siblings were away, Mom and I ate Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant, just the two of us. John refused to leave the law library even for a couple of hours.
It was during those lonely years that my lurking depression began to surface. It had been at a low simmer for a very long time, probably ever since my father died. Now that I was left to myself so much, it rose and began to consume me.
I was addicted to magazines in those years, devouring article after article in the barely conscious hope that somewhere in those pages I’d find the magic formula for happiness. I didn’t know I’d left that formula behind when I turned my back on God and his true Church. I was desperately searching in the world for something that could never be found there. But that life-saving epiphany was far in the future. I thought I was utterly alone.
One month, one of my favorite women’s magazines published a quiz meant to reveal clinical depression. I took the quiz and “passed” with flying colors, matching nearly every marker. When I showed it to John, he scoffed and gave me a “just snap out of it” speech. I closed the magazine and didn’t discuss the quiz with anyone else, continuing to slog through my days as best I could.
While John was still in school we didn’t talk about joining the Peace Corps, but it was often in the back of my mind. I wondered if John even remembered that dream. Law school was changing the way he thought. Everything became fodder for conflict and confrontation. He loved to argue and began honing his courtroom technique on me. He’d pick at me over some little thing, criticizing and goading until I screamed at him to stop, and then he’d call me a “fish wife.” It was a cruel trap I didn’t know how to avoid or escape. In between his attacks, John would look at me with loving eyes and tell me how beautiful and womanly I was, and how much he loved me.
Those tense confrontations were fun for him and he thought I enjoyed them, too. It took me years to convince him I hated them. The day I finally got through to him, he wrote the date on his blackboard and vowed never to do that to me again. He kept his word, but by then it was too late. Although I couldn’t admit it for years, even to myself, he had verbally abused the love out of me. The fairy tale was over without a happy ending. But I had to make myself believe I still loved John. I had invested too much of myself in our marriage to let it end, so I kept on muddling through, pretending all was well.
During his final year of law school, John took a job clerking for a local law firm. His first case was helping to defend a teenage boy who had murdered his whole family. John loved it, and he was very good at it. His love of conflict served him well in the courtroom. I don’t recall the outcome of that case, but John was hooked on courtroom drama after that.
His next case was defending an accused rapist he knew was guilty. Yes, I know defending the accused is necessary, but I’d never expected to be married to a man who delighted in arguing for ax murderers and rapists. I couldn’t reconcile this new version of my husband with the idealistic young man who’d written those letters. Where had that young man gone? Had he ever existed in real life, or only on paper? John was too busy to notice how unhappy I was.
When John started the paid clerking job, I told him I wanted to go back to school. By then I was working as a claims clerk for a big medical insurance company. I had just read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and it had affected me deeply. I felt impelled to try to teach young children to love and respect everyone, no matter their race, culture, social status, or religion. I still wanted to save the world. If John wouldn’t do it with me, I’d try to do it alone.
John went along with my plans, and I quit my job to enroll in early-childhood education courses at a junior college. While I was still in school, I made the mistake of taking a part-time job at a preschool that turned out to be a warehouse for the neglected children of working parents. We were mere babysitters of misbehaving kids, with little chance of teaching them anything in the overcrowded, chaotic conditions. Disillusioned, I quit that job and gave up my courses, enrolling instead in court-reporting school. It seemed the practical thing to do. I didn’t know I was setting the stage for the end of my first marriage and the beginning of the next phase of my life.
I don’t want to leave the impression that our marriage was all bad. John bought me red roses on every wedding anniversary, one perfect bloom for each year. We dressed up as Wonder Woman and Superman for a Halloween party and John made everyone laugh hysterically at his antics. All the nieces and nephews loved their Uncle John. He played and joked with them, dropping his false teeth and grinning to make them scream with laughter.
In the early years, we daydreamed together about the children we’d have after he became an attorney. My mother-in-law told me a story about John as a little boy. He used to say that when he grew up, he wanted his house to have a room filled with beds, and a baby in every bed. I thought I wanted six children with John. I’d grown up in a big family and wanted one of my own. But by the time John was halfway through law school, I was glad we’d put off having children. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I still needed mothering, and there was no chance of that.
John didn’t have any idea how I felt. He was consumed by his studies and his future career. He loved me, but he wanted me to stay in the background like a good little wife. A wife suffering from long-repressed grief didn’t fit in with his plans.
Many years later, with the wisdom of hindsight, I realized I wasn’t myself when I married John. I hadn’t truly been myself since my father died. In my mid- to late-twenties, I started, very slowly and tentatively, to grow into the confident woman I was meant to be. John had married a shy, closet rebel with a sweet, mild facade, given to occasional bouts of temper when provoked. He liked me sweet and mild unless he was intentionally provoking my temper. When I began to grow into myself, albeit with many growing pains, our incompatibility became increasingly apparent. If we hadn’t spent so much time apart, the end might have come sooner.
Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter 