Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

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If you will then, describe your wife's childhood and teenage years, focusing on her relationship with her father? How did this develop into adulthood? What patterns (good or bad) is she potentially repeating in her relationship with you?

In considering your request, I was struck by how little I really know about that. Just snippets, really. Her father died before I met her (I'm not sure he got to see his granddaughter). However, you will likely see a pattern here as I do.

Her mom and dad were both from Kansas but moved to the coastal Carolinas after college. That is where my wife was born. But according to what i heard and observed with her mom was that there was this very flat, practical, dry-witted man that was her father. From what I can tell he was a "tinkerer" (you know, he tinkered with this, he tinkered with that) and was pretty handy for some things.

A story that is told with some amusement is the story about this travel trailer that they bought to (eventually) put into a future resort site near the coast (we stayed in that trailer a number of times before we sold the trailer and the property). They bought the trailer used and towed it home and put it in the driveway of their house. Anyway, when they bought it, apparently no one had thought to check or to empty the bilge tank on the trailer and one afternoon shortly after this trailer was in their driveway, he opened the valve.

Now, I don't know whether it was accidental or whether he was woeking on something else, or what. But the contents of the tank spilled out onto the driveway and it was an awful, smelly mess. By the time my wife's mom got home from her job, it was mostly cleaned up.

When she asked what he had been doing that afternoon, he said flatly, and matter of factly, "Shovelling sh*t." Apparently, my rather matter of fact dry-witted observations remind her siblings of her dad.

From what I can tell, the relationship between her and her father was a good one and fairly tight. At one level she saw him as somewhat "spacey" (something she would also say about me). But from everything I've heard, he adored his oldest daughter (my wife). There is another family story about a portait of my wife that hangs in our dining room, how hers is in color (when they would colorize black and white photos) and hers was bigger than the ones for her siblings.

Her father was not, from what I can tell, a stern disciplinarian. I know what that is like and there is every indication that an authoritarian dictatorship would not be the term you would to describe him. Slow to anger is what I think you might use to describe him because I can't recall any example that any of the siblings have used to described as him "raising his voice." My wife was one of the "hot girls" in her high school. I already described the marching band majorette with the flaming baton. Her dad made that up for her and was there to light the baton as she got ready to perform. She, apparently, got more than one indecent proposition from that to which she could respond "Go ask my dad and see if that's okay with him."

What I can say is that as far as most rules were concerned, if he laid down the rules, my wife broke them. She'd sneak out of the house with her friends or they simply would go places where they had no reason for being there (simply because it was against the rules). An anti-authoritarian streak emerged and has run throughout her life (don't tell her what she can and can't do). Her second husband found that out the hard way as he was fairly definite about what she should and should not do.

That did not work out so well.

In an era and area of racial segregation, my wife grew up in a family that was very progressive for it's time and is another living example of going against the social grain of the time.

My impression, however, is that when her dad told her not to do something or would not give his permission, she would either do it anyway or find some way around the obstacle he had put before her. I can't say I'm aware of any particular consequence (like taking her car away) that had real teeth to it.

In remembering this, there is also this sentiment that she has stated more than once to other people: No man controls her and she has said directly to other men "Better men than you have tried." I don't recall her ever saying that to me (but she's probably said it to her friends about me).

After all, she does have a tee-shirt that proclaims "I AM the QUEEN of the UNIVERSE! Any Questions?"

Since she came home last night, she's spoken all of six words to me. I'm going to let her go on like this for about the next week and then sit her down and say: "see what this is like, see what effort and what anger there is for you in knowing that you are intentionally not going to speak to me because of what might be going on on the other side? That's what it is like for me most of the time. If you did this everyday of the remainder of your marriage to me, you'd still be almost 23 years behind me in experience. And I'm hardly a tryrant compared to many other people."