Marriage Anyone?

During my master’s degree program in Clinical Psychology, I took a course in family therapy. One of our assignments was to interview an older couple who had been through various stages of their marriage. I interviewed my parents. My dad would have been about 60-years-old at the time of the interview. My dad said that he wanted to marry my mom, in part, because she was intelligent and had a good head on her shoulders. “She seemed to know what she was doing.” My mother reacted with some surprise to his comments. They both told me a nice account of their early days together.

 

My dad said that he thought he had made one major mistake when they first got married, and if he could do it over, he wouldn’t make the same choice. He said that as a newly married couple, they rented an apartment along with another couple. The two couples lived together in the one apartment. The other couple had a young child and the father disciplined by spanking with a belt. Neither of my parents approved of this approach. After seeing this happen repeatedly, on one occasion, my father confronted the man. My mother proudly reported, “Your Dad told him to stop hitting that boy with a belt and if he saw it happen again, he would pound the guy!” There was tension between the two couples until they were able to separate. Looking back, my dad assessed that their bonding as a couple was hindered by the presence of other people.

 

There was a lot of tension in my parents’ marriage by the time I was growing up. This had developed over years. There is a psychological diagnosis, Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), which comes about when an event in a person’s early childhood years seriously disrupts the normal development of bonding between parent and child. This event could be an illness, separation from the parent, abuse, or anything that could be experienced as traumatic. For my mother, it was the death of her father when she was age five. RAD manifests as a difficulty to form stable relationships and to bond with another. The normal, age appropriate stages of development are disrupted. It can severely impair a person’s functioning from family to employment to community. I don’t believe my mother would meet the clinical diagnosis. She certainly bonded with each of her three children and she did remain in a stable marriage for almost 40 years and was stable in her employment. I could only say that she had traits of RAD. My mother painfully doubted my father’s love for her and frequently lamented to me that he didn’t with various examples of less than sufficient care for her. I would try to reassure her that he did (Of course he did, right?!) The insecurity wasn’t just in my mother. My dad admitted during a confrontation by her that he indeed didn’t say the words, “I love you.” He said to her, “You know I have trouble with that.” She was not happy to just accept that as good enough. My dad restricted his emotion, possibly lost touch with the true experience of a full range of emotion. For example, when given a gift at Christmas, he would put on an act of a happy reaction. He would say something like, “Wow!” or “Whee! Great!” but it seemed put-on over a basically flat response.

 

Attachment theory describes secure and insecure attachment. One form of insecure attachment is ambivalent attachment. In observational studies of young children, this type of insecurely attached child would panic when the parent went away and would cry for their return. But when the parent returned, the child would be angry and would reject the parent, would even hit or kick at the mother. Regardless of my father’s restricted expression of fondness, my mother generally carried with her a guardedness, a distrust, which didn’t allow her to relax into the marital relationship. Like the insecurely attached child, she desperately wanted my father’s love but she frequently pushed him away with anger. When she was wounded, she would enter into yelling rampages. My brother said when he and my sister were growing up, my father would argue with my mother; he would engage. I am eleven years younger than my brother, 15 years younger than my sister. During my growing up years, he no longer argued with her. He stayed quiet, clenched his jaw with the muscle in his cheek bulging from tension, and he would walk away. Evidently, by then, he had determined it wasn’t worth it.

 

My mother held onto hurts and slights. There was a story which when brought up, even many years later, would still rouse her anger. Early in their marriage, my mother met my father at the door upon his return home from work. She tried to do the typical 50’s era wife thing of greeting him with a kiss. His response, “Get away! You’re just like a sticky fly!” Mom’s response, she never initiated such affection again.

 

When my brother and sister were little, Mom became angry at Dad while he was across the street talking with the neighbor. She left the kids in the house, backed the car out, and yelled at him, “You take care of the kids!” as she angrily drove off. Dad calmly said to the neighbor, “Guess I’d better go take care of things.” Another time, she was so angry with him she packed a couple of suitcases and was going to leave him. I don’t know how he calmed her in that instance. Though he no longer argued with her directly during my years, he did act as a buffer for me. Mom was intense. She loved me. I knew she loved me. I loved her. But at times my Dad would need to step in. For example, when I was about age 14, Mom’s friend, Phyllis Barth, came to visit along with her high-school-age daughter. Phyllis dramatically told of her daughter’s recent illness with high fever and severe dehydration. It almost killed her. It just happened that I was sick. I tried to go to bed, but became nauseous and vomited. Mom became adamant that I needed to keep fluids in me so that I wouldn’t become dehydrated. I drank a little water and threw up. She had me drink water again and I threw up. Again, despite my protest, she insisted that I drink some water and I threw up. Somehow, she and Phyllis got the idea that I should have orange juice. I had some sips of orange juice and threw up. They were still pushing the drink upon me. We were all in the kitchen with me weakly sitting and my dad across the room leaning against the counter. As I was being pressured to drink some more, I looked at my dad miserably. He then arose to my defense and said, “Leave her alone now. Let her go to bed.” And my mother followed his direction. This was an interaction that would happen over the years, my dad stepping in when my mom was going too far. When he passed away, that was one of the first losses I recognized: I no longer had a buffer.

 

Also, in my self-awareness, I realize that I learned from my mother to be guarded and distrustful in relationships. I can be overly trusting in the goodness of other people, but in regards to being vulnerable with my emotions, I keep much hidden and maintain a degree of distance. This was reinforced by watching the course of my parents’ marriage and by the dissolution of my own marriage. I also restrict my emotions like my dad, generally and automatically keeping a stoic control over my reactions. Then, in close, personal relationships, if I feel hurt (and those closest to us can inflict the most hurt) I react like my mother. I find it interesting that I have developed defenses by taking on the defenses of my parents in reaction to the hurts they experienced in childhood. The influence of those hurts extends to the next generation that didn’t directly experience them. What was my Dad’s early childhood wound? He was born in 1930. This was the Great Depression and my grandparents lost their farm that year. They moved into town when my dad was one-year-old. Possibly my dad took on a style of depression he picked up from his own parents produced from their substantial loss and combined with a German stoicism.

 

My parents did enjoy each other. They were best when they could go out dancing. My dad was entertained by my mother’s spunk and rowdiness. They both liked to share interactions or observations from their days that they could laugh about. Humor was something they had in common. And they were a team when it came to parenting. They agreed with each other; there was no playing one against the other. They could set a firm limit. Both were intelligent and valued education. They had the same values of honesty, loyalty, perseverance, striving to do one’s best, and being responsible. They were good parents. They were a good pair.

Joe Anne meets James Reed

Joe Anne returned to live near her mother. At that time, my grandmother was living in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho. She always kept the house in Hailey, Idaho but would go to other places to teach during the school year. My grandfather’s parents had moved from Mackay, Idaho to Pocatello, Idaho where they were living at the time my grandparents married. My grandparents were married in Pocatello and returned to live in Mackay. My grandmother was now living in Lava Hot Springs, which is quite close to Pocatello. Pocatello was the family stomping grounds for a few generations.

My mother was a young woman. She liked to have fun! She liked groups of people and dancing. One weekend evening, she was with her friend, Edie, and the girls were looking to have fun. Edie knew some guys and called them up. Three young men arrived and they had already been drinking. The good times were on! They all headed to Pocatello to go dancing. At some point in the evening, they needed more alcohol or cigarettes or something. My mother joined the guys on the drive. The man who would one day be my father, James Reed, was in the front seat with her in the middle. He rested his arm on the back of the bench seat behind her shoulders. She told me she knew he was a nice guy because he didn’t try to touch her or make any moves. She felt comfortable with his arm just behind her.

They returned to the dance scene. My mother was dancing to nearly every song played. In those days, everyone danced with everyone even if they were part of a couple. (That doesn’t seem so easy to do these days, maybe because there isn’t a formal dance step for people to follow which could make dance partners easily interchangeable.) According to my mother, James Reed had imbibed so much alcohol later in the evening that he was barely conscious. Sitting in a booth, he slouched sideways and rested his head on her shoulder. She would lift his head and push him aside to rest against the wall when she got up to dance. When she would return to her seat, he would resume resting his head on her shoulder. She would push him aside again when she wanted to dance. According to my dad, the next day he had been so drunk that he couldn’t remember what she looked like or what her name was. He just knew he wanted to see “the red-headed girl in the pink dress” again. He went asking around about her.

 

James Reed was just out of the navy. He had been in the navy during the Korean War. He had a tattoo on the back of his right forearm of an eagle and an anchor from a night of drinking with his sailor buddies. He was from American Falls, Idaho of the “crazy German family that lived on the hill and made dandelion wine.” When he contacted my mother after the night of drinking and dancing, they met in a park. My mother brought my sister, Christine, who was a year old. My mother said she determined he was a good person to date because he played with my sister and my sister liked him. They dated, many weekends of dancing and socializing while my grandmother babysat, and were married after six months (My sister was age two then). My dad’s employer at the time said it was a good thing he was getting married and would settle down a bit because he was going to kill himself with all of the drinking he was doing. He did settle down. He didn’t like going to the bar after work to drink with the men. He wanted to go home. He got harassed because he helped around the house, for instance, he helped my mother to wash all of the windows. His new job with National Cash Register took them to live in Ogden, Utah, where my brother, Michael, was born. My sister was four-years-old.