The summer after we graduated was a difficult time, I think for everyone in both families. Here I was the youngest of three daughters and had the first grandchild on both sides of the family. He was a beautiful baby and my mother just adored him. My mother-in-law didn’t like me (after all I had gotten her son pregnant) but she liked my mom…everyone liked my mom and the two families tried to make the best of it.
My husband went right to Junior College while working as a stock boy at a local store, and I started looking for a job. My husband, in the meantime, was suffering guilt because he was a Catholic and we had been married by a judge instead of a priest. Even when we were dating, there were huge differences between what we believed. Take sex for instance. He thought anything that was that great had to be a sin and I thought anything that was that great had to be O.K. on some level. His guilt grew or at least that’s the excuse he gave for moving back home to his parents house.
I started looking for a priest that would marry us without me having to sign my child over to the Catholic church. When my parents were kids growing up in the South, Catholics were “Papist” and the Pope all but had horns as far as they were taught, so I knew that I couldn’t sign any kind of paper saying I agreed to raise my kids Catholic.
I found a priest in the city that thought it was worse for us to be separated than the alternative and he said he would marry us without me having to agree to anything but to raise my kids Christian. I had been staying in the city with my best friend Betty (who is still my best friend these 50 years later) and I had gotten sick with a sinus infection but I just had to get home to tell my husband the good news.
The town we lived in was about an hour away from San Francisco and I remember getting a ride from one of Betty’s friends and I was so sick I was hallucinating on the way home. We arrived at about midnight and I had him just drop me off because I knew I was going to have to sneak around the house and tap on the window to wake him up. But he was still awake and at his desk studying and he let me in the back door.
I remember telling him my great news and how his face fell as I was telling him. I asked him what was wrong and he admitted that what he wanted was an annulment instead of a ceremony with a priest. He took me home and I know he felt so bad but it was the truth and he couldn’t lie about his feelings. He had tried to spare me the hurt by blaming it on the Church and I appreciated that. ”I’ll think about this tomorrow” I said to myself ala Scarlett O’Hara.
I was in bed with that sinus infection for almost two weeks. It’s hard to heal your body when your heart is broken. But…looking on the bright side, I went to bed a size 12 and got out of bed a size 7. As my mom would say “That’ll help your sore toe” (I never knew exactly what she meant by that but she said it for every occasion where something good came out of a bad situation”.
After that I got a job in San Francisco with Bank of America and I started trying to put my life back together. My husband and I would see each other when he could get away from school and work, to visit his son and sometimes we would go out. Since neither of us were dating and I was so in love with him, some of our visits were very sweet and physical.
By this time I was sharing an apartment with my oldest sister Janice who was going through a divorce of her own and the man she was dating gave me some advice. He said “Sharon, you are never going to get him back while you are ‘ever ready Eddie’, you need to make him think you are interested in someone else”. I thought that was just nuts and I could never do that because I am someone who can’t act worth beans. Everything shows on my face all the time and I know it.
It just so happened that my husband called my mom one Friday and asked if he could pick me up at the bus station instead of her and on that occasion I had met someone at the bank that said they were going to my town and would give me a ride. My mom told him that I didn’t need a ride because a man was bringing me home and did he want me to call him when I arrived? He said yes.
O, I have forgotten a huge part of the story. Funny that it slipped my mind when it was so huge back then.
When we were both in Choir, we took a bus ride to perform at another school and we sat together and talked. It was the first time we had ever spoken to each other and he told me all about this beautiful girl that had been his first love. He had broken up with her because she wanted to go dancing at the recreation hall and he didn’t want to and she went anyway. Him being of Spanish decent…well that was it for him. His pride wouldn’t let him back down after telling her that if she went without him, they were through. I was too young and dumb to know that he was still carrying a torch for her.
When I was about 8 months pregnant, he came home from work late one evening and he was really upset. She had come into the store and he realized that he still had feelings for her. He was so upset and now I was upset and we didn’t know what to do but to go knock on our Choir teachers door. We both loved her and trusted her and thought she had some answers for us. I don’t remember anything she said to us but the result was that we both felt better afterwards. And all the feelings went underground.
Now fast forward to a time just before me getting a ride home from the “other guy”, when my husband and I are having another conversation about his first love. He had run into her mom and it brought it all up for him again. I remember thinking about love while he was telling me how he still had feelings for her and I was able to tell him “If you love her, I want you to have her”…and I meant it.
That was the last conversation I had with him before he called my mom to say he wanted to pick me up from the bus and found out that I was with “ANOTHER MAN”. The Spanish blood was on the rise again.
To be continued…
